 you all so much thank you I just I was just hoping for the opportunity first and foremost thank you all very much for your time and and coming out here I just wanted to make myself available the first of many many to find out what it is that our department's doing well what we're not doing so well at and what your expectations of me and this department are so we can incorporate strategic plan and move forward with everything that's going on with policing in this country I can't control Minneapolis Chicago New York but I damn well sure and I part of my language but I feel very passionate about it is show other agencies that it is possible that the partnership with their communities is possible and people really do care and and that's how I think that we can be that continue to be a national leader in what we're doing so with that I just again thank you all very much for your time and I'm here to listen and any questions you have of me or anything that you want to say thick-skinned let me have it you think you need you need less people you know actually looking statistically speaking so I understand what I understand what it is that you know every agency every private business as a matter of fact has been doing more with less and and we've been doing it for so long we're all at skeleton crews the according to the FBI the average and that's not to say that's the correct number but the average number average agencies are hovering around 2.2 to 2.4 officers per thousand residents now Montpelier is at about 2.2 when you look at our current population of about 7800 but if you have you factor in the weekday sessions and then we pop up to 20,000 workers yeah we're you know so so there is yes so the majority of our budget for the city here we're at about a 3.8 million dollar budget department of public works is about 10 point something else so and about 80% of our budget goes towards personnel cost it doesn't go for equipment or anything else and then we we don't have enough money to do things like training so one of the big discussions about this is the police need more training the police need more training we don't have the finances to send people to specialize places and so but that's not to say that it's not incumbent upon me to find different ways and creative ways to get that happening so I figure if we can't send people to training we'll figure it out ourselves and train and do it ourselves and then any money that revenue we're able to generate from that send our officers and our dispatchers and civilians to other places to get advanced level of training so my whole goal was to make sure we're not tapping into taxes that we're good stewards of taxpayer money and and and they go after grants like like nobody's business I'm sorry did that answer your question or okay there any other questions thank you hopefully getting more diverse and and we you know you know we have a very small tax base and that's you know 52% of our downtown area is tax exempt so it's it's an it's an incredible burden that we have in terms of being able to support basically a work center and a government center for a lot of people so it's an interesting it's an interesting thing it's an interesting challenge you know get out and rattle doorknobs you know we definitely will and that's when you say get out and rattle doorknobs one of the consistent things that we're hearing not not just from people in the public but just from the officers are how are we going to we want to get out there we want to meet people we want to do foot patrols we want to be highly visible and we want to get to know the people of our community and we just have to figure out again the personnel based issues if we only have two officers on street for safety sakes we're hoping that two officers can respond to one call but how do we open it up so that our officers can get out there and meet people and do the best that they possibly can and it's funny because I do want to hit a Tony Fakus has did an outstanding job in this department and he has been a national leader and I and I came from the whole circle of looking studying departments from consent decrees for the Department of Justice and seeing the the department I'm like no way it's it's too good to be true when I came here and I saw it and I'm sitting and I and I get the chance to speak to the officers and the civilians of this department it's almost like a the train has left the station and you need to run to catch up with us because if you're not part of this culture and this culture is about service this culture is about treating people with dignity or respect and I'm like whoa and it's legitimate and it's serious even to I laughed at one point we were I was someplace else doing some type of training and then somebody said hey you know what they call them up here Police Department right MPD I'm like no they're like it's the most polite department so within our circles other agencies are saying hey MPD is the most polite department and you know what I damn well would take that and I think that that's awesome so we're gonna blaze our own trails and continue to go forward so but thank you for that input we will definitely get out there and knocking on doors thank you I know domestic disputes is a big one for police officers is that a big percentage you think this is gonna be one of those things that I'm still trying to get my hands around but officer our Corporal Phil Brick is here he could probably give you a good answer on that I hear Pete's question sir I know domestic disputes are pretty hard on police especially in the country surrounding area I didn't know is that a big percentage down here do you think maybe not as bad I think it's not the biggest percentage of calls that we interact with most of our quality of life calls and other things yeah they're much more minor but they are some of the most dangerous and like emotional they seem to be yeah or you know incidents where somebody will call for your help and then the next minute they're they're angry at you or fighting they got a weapon to come out aggressively because you're now you know dealing with your partner or their family member yeah they care about deeply so they got they got to the point where they were willing to call for help yeah and then we come and then you know so there's a lot of it escalates from their hood you know it's most of his feelings there so we've been trying to be sort of the savior of me coming in the health and of being bad guys both parties so you're getting it you're getting it from both sides is the reason why it's so dangerous is the reason why we have minimum staffing which is reason why we we show up with a reasonable number of officers yeah that's one of the nice things about being impure here is that we have that piece of mind because of our level of staffing because of the support the city has given us in the community a big part of the officer wellness pillar of 21st century policing the officers feeling safe when they go into an environment which means they're less likely to use force of any type yeah because they have support are also on the back end less likely to be emotionally strained or mentally strained right so it all goes hand-in-hand but it isn't the biggest thing we deal with it is one of the most significant and most regular things you know in case for instance we go to I think in Burlington they were talking about maybe going towards trying to have more people on an agency level go out we weren't police you know initially one of the one of the most different different statistically speaking calls for service regarding domestic violence is one of the most dangerous calls that police officers can respond to and then when you look at there's another part of it too it's not just you know there's a lot of folks rightfully so that want to make sure hey you know a lot of these calls for service let's reevaluate them we want to reevaluate them too is it appropriate for a police officer to respond to this type of call or that type of call and we need to make sure we open that up when we're reviewing the municipal codes of chapter 11 and chapter 10 here that we put them out to the public and say hey how do you want us to respond to these things but yeah it's it's statistically speaking they're they're very dangerous and if you do bring in if you do partner with social service agencies and you tell them hey this is gonna be it's a domestic incident we want to try to solve this at a level that doesn't involve you know police officers yeah one of the first things they're gonna say is we're not gonna go into that situation until you go in there first and you make it safe then we'll go into it so either way and those are policies we can't control yeah but either way it if I make a real quick funny story when I when I first was getting ready to join the Chicago Police Department both of my parents are retired off the job and my father was telling me a story about you watch your back on domestics you be careful on domestics and like okay so there's a story behind this what is it and I pulled it out of him and basically he came into a into a to a call and it was a it was a husband and wife situation and he had severely beaten her and as he came in and she's he's there he's there so he fought with the officers fought my father and everyone else and as they're trying to gain control she picked up a frying pan and went up behind my father and cracked them in the back of the head he's like yeah so you make sure you're careful because there's a lot of emotions that come into these types of situations so it's um yeah we do but but understanding even with that still understanding that we have to make sure that we don't go into these situations we have to be tactfully ready and mindful these things can happen but we can't come into a situation and say it's a domestic who's gonna be the first person to punch me because that starts this whole mindset that when I come in somebody's getting their butt kicked yeah and we can't we yeah we have to make sure from the beginning of our culture that we don't train that way because in a lot of departments around the city or not the city but around the country we'll train into a scenario based trainings like you'll come into a building they'll say it's a domestic go in there and you'll clear the house and then everything's fine all of a sudden somebody in full camo pops up from the you know from the ceiling hole they're like I got you in from now on you're like holy crap whenever I go into any house I need to be you know and that just puts us at a different level and that starts a culture of in my opinion distrust yeah so we have to be realistic and how we start and how people who come into this job all the way to the end yeah that it's we have to work on relationships and building we need them we would love them and it's a it's it's an accountability tool to make sure that the public understands what we're doing and and as well as it's also a deescalator that in some cases if we came to a scene if somebody's getting a parking ticket and they're cussing Michelle out up and down and you hit that record button and people kind of officers go on their best behavior and people who are not doing so good things tend to go on their best behaviors as well but it's a very good accountability to I don't know if you want to add anything to that there's a study dying in California City where they had different ships with different equipment they equipped one ship with body cameras and one ship without they found that the use of the force in that ship with the cameras went down incredibly just as Steve said both because officers were aware they're being reported on their best behavior and doing everything by the book and because the public as we go up you can say you're being on over here is what's going on if you do everything by the book and that would be a best seller and so it just changes everybody's behavior and then like you said accountability we can go back to something and review it whether it be the public or the administration or the officers themselves and then it's an amazing evidentiary tool as well we don't we have we have cameras on our cruisers we have microphones on our body to record audio and where I know he's being recorded right now but that's the only recording device we have at the moment so the current legislation yeah and then that's going to be one of those other things like so the current legislation I think it's Senate Bill 219 that that's going through there's last I remember it they're talking about an implementation phase statewide of body-worn cameras and by October 1st I think that was the last thing that I saw but at the same time I don't know if the state's going to give money and so it's like hey so how do we creatively deal with this throughout our budgets to implement something like this we're all for it but we have to figure out a way to creatively do it and put it in so right now our department is we're working on doing a like a field study of you will probably within the next week we have one company called Visual Labs that's looking that that's going to let us do a trial period on it it's not going to be something that we're going to you're going to you know see officers in the street with the camera active it's something that we're going to be dealing with and using behind the scenes testing them out because we want to make sure we have a policy in place a good policy not one that we just rush together and do it just to have a trial or a trial field run so we're working currently looking at a visual labs watch guard and potentially one at one other but we are right now proactively looking at body-worn cameras are most of the officers you know uh see our sergeants are real officers dispatchers and what's the attitude of the unit for your body camera issue and I think you want you want to have those tools because they're all they've done in 99% of situations is to gonerate officers and show that or they've caught officers doing that thing too so it's helpful to have that larger support behind us when there's amazing situations but it's wrong the worst thing the feeling is it'd be like doing all these small small things it helps us build a great report community helps community trust us understand isn't how it's really significant most often negative interactions with the people instead of having this low level absolutely like that whether it be parking of planes or some of these garbage cans around the suburb dispute or you have mediates you know as a chief it is alluded to a lot of times there's a lot of things we'd be happy to hand over to other services that would maybe be not more of those resources or be more well versed in it but you know we often and we really enjoy and appreciate having those interactions and normalizing having normal interactions with the public that helps us with our mental health and our emotional and the support of the public it's not all negative things we want to go in a negative situation it's going to take it to be personally one of the most frustrating things about the call for us to pull back on things we're going to lose a bit of positive and if I could add something to the union thing because there is a national dialogue especially like like CNN is running an article right now that unions are standing in the way of progressive police reform and in some cases yes but I would say here within Montpelier there is a very strong working relationship between the officers the unions and and the police department of management so when I came over Tony Faketz was telling me pretty much everything that's been going on and how previous negotiations have been going and even to the extent that it's not an adversarial process for the most part where the officers like I'm not sure if you were here before but when I got here and speaking with everyone in the department it's more or less Pete if you come in here you need to make sure that you treat everybody in our community with respect you need to make sure you carry yourself a certain way you need to make sure you do XYZ XYZ that's the culture so if and if I'm not on board they're leaving me and rightfully so and I'm really ecstatic about that but our working relationship with our union our officers are pushing for programs reforms and protections that are that are designed with our culture and our culture is service and so that's where we're at for other places I can't necessarily speak to them but I can definitely say that thank you and if I could also mention something else it kind of brought they kind of made me think about something again when we talk about the types of calls for service that our police department should be responding to we also have to look at what type of laws and ordinances we're putting on the books because ultimately for we can expect that somebody's going to call the police department to deal with some type of an ordinance and fraction so if for example face mask so if someone's at Shaw's and they're not wearing a face mask and someone says hey I think you need to have a face mask on because it's city ordinance and they say you know the heck with you I'm not going to do it then who are they going to end up defaulting to call and if we come and if we try to deescalate situations say hey this is what we want to do or the store owners say they're causing a ruckus I don't want them in my store and well you're going to have to let me go out of the store because there are people that are like that and then we have to go hands on with somebody over something like a face mask and and and while we understand what it you know the public health issue with it but it's not going to look good and so you know it's it's the absolute truth none of us in uniform wants to be the next person on youtube doing something that's going to be that's going to put us into a certain situation and we definitely don't want to to ruin or spoil the reputation of our city so those are the types of things that we're trying to factor in as we're doing these things and which is why we want to make sure that we're responding correctly to these calls and and we we have a level of an idea of enforcement of of what the public expects from us Chinaman Chief? Yes, Chinaman real quick on that we are ordinances are written in the city like officers have a lot of discretion on certain things you know we can use our judgment as to whether before how to enforce something or how to deal with it. One of the issues we've run into is that the way our ordinances are written you know for something like urination or defecation in public or an open container those are only arrestable offenses they're the results on criminal charge versus there being some sort of civil ticket or fine you can give somebody so our sort of our tools and levels that we can use are limited you know things there's so many calls and things I mean drinking over in the park over here we're going to address it we give them a warning we're talking about it off the services we can come back the next day and they get the same call and the same thing and eventually we're using them to move to using that tool but if our only tool is arrest somebody which generally it's just a citation an invitation report on it not a familial arrest that still limits our options as to how we can basically address the issue and keep it to a reasonable it's a reasonable level so that's something else that would exceed is to have our ordinance booked out and maybe have some more levels put in there for us to use and we are currently reviewing those ordinances basically bill uh the city manager assistant city manager they're having all departments going through and looking at uh at our current ordinances and trying to make sure that they're up that they're updated and up kept curious about all of those situations I remember the man's name was filled on the street that was pretty true parked outside the park and so there's also situations there there's a long time scale and other agencies got involved and um I find those really upsetting I understand the context is complicated but um I think in my fantasy I'd love to hear that you know this is our problem you know this is our town like we would maintain control of those situations and we would sort of step down to our community values in terms of de-escalation like take as much time as it takes to end those conflicts in a way that's not fatal and but I don't actually know how those uh your sexual stuff works I mean the high school situation is mostly state police and one NPD officer I think is who actually is involved in the shooting I just don't know how large she is I'd love to see her move to slow down and have people roughly alive okay um if I may um so like this is one of those cases that I'm going to say that I'm not too read in to how the policy or the procedures and things go normally when you have an emergency situation like that the the home department kind of will maintain control in a sense if you will but the operation itself um will probably go to the whoever the tactical commander is um so in that case it could be you know the Vermont state police so yes uh my predecessor Tony Fakus was a big advocate about trying to do regionalized teams to respond to certain things but again it comes back to another issue of money and resources and making sure that we're not going to be a burden um by asking for all different things uh so in in that particular situation and those particular situations I'm not I'm not sure but I do know the incident for um that happened at the high school that that entire scenario continued on for roughly an hour and a half before it unfortunately came to that ending and there's a lot of people that have asked me why did all the cops shoot that's a legitimate thing and there are a lot of uh what what tends to happen and something like that is when you're in a very high stress situation you're in a very tonal whole thing and uh and I'm not excusing the what happened I'm just trying to you know but uh so when you hear a gunshot you're you're not sure if somebody's shooting at you or anything else the bottom line of that is it was an extremely unfortunate situation for everyone around for the families for the individual who was shot and then for the officers who were involved in that as well and and all the kids yes who are who are like what is happening what yes and and it is traumatizing for everyone so the hope is that we can continue to have our community partnerships so that we don't that we can minimize if there's a one percent chance that we can make sure that something like that doesn't happen again and that that includes us loading a whole bunch of things on the front end to hope that no one falls through the cracks and damn it we're going to do it because it's just not it's worth human life it's worth us doing everything in our power to make sure that we that we that we continue to value it and we avoid from using it there's another part that I kind of want to mention as well I understand that there there was a community dialogue on whether the Montpelier police department should have tasers and and I there's a lot of stuff out there you're seeing officers tasing people and it's like you know what this this looks like like crap and in the beginning when when tasers first came out there weren't really good policies surrounding them tasers were thought to be like a end all tool I come into it you guys are arguing if you guys don't stop arguing and well I'm going to still keep arguing zap and that should not be how tasers are used so in a sense our culture kind of blew that opportunity to have that in the in the eyes of the of the public the people who should be holding us accountable but then there's another issue if we come into a situation and someone has a knife or someone has a bad the only tools that the Montpelier police department has right now is this hunk of steel right here and that gun and that OC spray so our the resources we have are limited in trying to de-escalate there's a situation that we don't resort to deadly force and speaking of deadly force we don't do chokeholds to me a chokehold situation is something that that warrants on the use of force continuum it's deadly force anything that has something to do with the head neck or the spine the airway it's it's deadly force and the only reason or the only time you should even consider doing something like that is if your life or the life of someone else is threatened within the law enforcement circle it shouldn't be that what I'm going to do to try to gain control of the situation Montpelier police department's not taught that the from my understanding the Vermont training academy does not teach that there may be some other places that do we sure as hell don't and we never will are you still having bicycle patrols or I don't know a while ago I don't know if they can afford that we do have bicycles still downstairs yeah no two three years ago yeah actually started doing it a little bit the beginning of the warmer weather but because of the the coronavirus yeah because of the yeah came a little more difficult it's pretty effective oh they're they're amazing thank you guys take care of staffing especially the equipment officers who are trained in the um sort of the you know the tactics and techniques of bike patrol oh yeah um but you can see a lot on a bicycle oh absolutely it's right back in you know the biggest thing is just being out and open yeah and available to the community just we are now and they're having closed into a you know it's okay to drive and buy yeah it's a lot you know you're wearing shorts and a polisher you're a little more being a little bit more approachable yeah than I am now but also you know the gear the radio yeah that's true too then they're going to be complaints about chicken legs too so I've seen you talking about legs this is a great tool and something we enjoyed doing especially with the big events like this we're doing third yeah we had a big event yesterday there would have been at least three of us on bikes with it yeah because we don't have any cars anyway but it's just such a great tool with a huge crowd where there's no vehicle access here yeah we can get around town faster on a bike and buy a car they're also and I and I don't want to mean to be the negative Nancy these are programs that we want to do but it also we have to look at at what our limitations are so well well not even that I mean because I'm pretty sure we can we can find donors or different ways to get the to get the bikes in but then it becomes an issue of there are only two officers on a shift and one officer is say if we're doing we're going to do foot patrols or the biking and there's a domestic incident that's going on on the other side of town how do now there's a safety issue so we have to make sure that we're we're very deliberate and very careful in how we do this and then the other thing is too we don't want to again it's comes back to being stewards of a taxpayer dollars we don't want to you know how's that going to look that is that wise for us to say okay we're going to bring in these two officers here on overtime time and a half to ride up and down the main street doing what we what we want to do and what we're supposed to be doing but at the same time we're bringing you in on overtime to make sure that we have enough people to cover the streets so it's it's a it's a it's a very tricky thing but your department is up to the challenge and we want to do it so we'll find ways to make sure that we do it and we're out there I've heard a little bit about the service as part of your culture which sounds amazing and I'm wondering about how service shows up with how you take care of each other and like how is self-care and mental health available to your officers and that also just brings up like when an incident happens that's disturbing do you have a really amazing process for debriefing it or is it joked about you know what is it like how do you debrief is there a process what's the culture do you care about each other oh yes we do I would describe it as a family yeah some families are talking again you know we have our interpersonal issues at times but I describe it as a productive loving family and we all work strange hours with each other we all deal with interesting incidents and that builds strong relationships just as you know any type of other difficult situations can whether that be military or how they're hardship positions but we have what's called an employee assistance program set up which provides free counseling getting an officer that requests it and obviously having them be available doesn't mean going to use it but it's accepted but we're fortunate to have a culture where you know we we talk freely about in fact that oh I go and see you know again my counselor is joked like I see I'm talking for a variety of reasons over the years and sometimes most reason to provide by the PD for the last seven years you know we have several people like myself or peer counselors who are trained to like recognize signs of of issues but also to kind of be advocates so most of us will talk openly about the fact that we do see counseling making an exception and I believe we have that here because I use it I see my colleague use it and you know bounce back from difficult difficult things you know whether it's an individual incident or just you know love at home or just the slow grind that we were going to a lot of things very effective and then we have had a critical incident a major incident like when the you know the shooting at the high school or the one on the bridge or other incidents like that where we've had there's been a death involved there's a there's a debris process there's a crisis scene that comes in and I was involved in the march on shooting I was the MPD officer who was there and who fired so like I've addressed that myself personally but as a group we sat down after the event everybody who was involved you know the game wardens who came in afterwards and use metal detector to find you know they've just been around all the way down to the officers like myself who pulled the trigger as well the dispatchers were dispatching everybody who's involved can then sat down and talk through everything you know and shared and you know everybody's different some people were sharing one of the most but when you sit down there together you have a trained team that is kind of trained you know to pull you know pulling things out of it and making normal you see everybody kind of open up and seeing the sharing start happening and the venting and the you know just the healing start yeah whether it's these significant incidents or just everyday stuff it all takes a toll and like you're pointing out we need to take care of ourselves because when you can't take care of ourselves how can we take care of the community if I'm depressed or angry or upset and I go and deal with somebody else's problem whether it be a domestic or a parking complaint that's that's going to lead I think that is what leads to officers overreacting and really bad situations happening involving police officers and you and you the spirit of what your your question is is there is long been I'll throw my wife on the on on the burner for a quick second as well when I first met her she said she'll never marry a police officer because we're too arrogant we're too macho we're too type A personality nothing bothers us nothing hurts us and that's just it's bull crap and then when you have a culture that continues on with that almost like hey I broke my leg we'll rub some dirt on it get back up and go we don't talk about our feelings here that that adds to a whole issue of promoting and us versus them and making it making it so that you try to protect yourself and by doing it you demonize the people that you're sworn to protect that's just where it comes from and we need to be we need to promote that we need to share our stories and we need to admit that a lot of these things that are going out there that we see and that we're dealing with and that they have trauma with us and not only that but they also have trauma with you if you're in a situation that's going to bring trauma then we need to be incumbent upon we need to do what we can to help you and your families as you're going through these same issues so it's within this department it's okay to be a grown person and cry it's okay myself personally I do have PTSD and I got it pretty bad and I'll tell that to anyone else in this department so that they realize that it's okay to to be human it's okay to hurt but she's got to climb out of that are you familiar at all with Reginald Minnocken's book my grandmother's hands I'm sorry my grandmother I was just told to read that yesterday I have a copy for you I would love to read it I would love to talk to you after would love that opportunity I'm Abby Jaffe I'm from the everything space and I'm a somatic treatment educator and I've been working with police with victim services in Burlington before and I'd love to make your acquaintance I would love the opportunity to speak with you my grandmother's hand by Reginald Minnocken it's about racialized trauma and how it took us in white bodies black bodies and police bodies thank you thank you I have a copy for you too okay yes welcome thank you right you can join us here in Montpelier and your whole family too I'll say that this guy is one of my favorite people and really it's been an honor to get to know you and that that it you know when we talk it occurs to me that you know you work for us yes the general public and we helped define what we want you to do and I think it's a question of really all of us looking at what are the needs and then what's the most appropriate way to meet those needs and and at the same time to look at what it is you're doing and see which of those things you don't want to be doing or shouldn't be doing or we can do better in another way I think a lot of it starts with helping us understand what you do and how you do it Mike and I talked about that extensively you are 100 correct I think it starts with making sure that we have all the information we possibly can give out to the public yeah we make sure it's out there and we're in the process of doing all that right now traffic data stops what times of days that we're dealing with the the majority of the instances that we're responding to what our policies rules and regulations are how we're doing our budgeting how we're forecasting we're going to push that all out as soon as we possibly can with then hopefully the next coming two to three months thank you I look forward to working for you are there any are there any other questions anything else that we can learn anything else that you want to see your department doing that we may not be living up to we're here to listen we're here to improve we're here to be better and we're here to be the best damn department in the state and when we can only do that by knowing what it is that you expect from us thank you for being here thank you no thank you well I know you said you're short-handed and all but I you mentioned that I believe that and I now have a profit from walking is not on bike today but I know you're short-handed yeah I only caught some of that sir are we are we going to try to go back to to walking the beat or to to walking in high this that's what we wanted to do you know the most stressful things the last two years I worked six hundred hours of overtime each year and that's to maintain our minimum staffing having it you know the overnight hours from midnight to eight is a supervisor and officer the rest of the time other than on weekends or holidays it's the minimum of two officers and one supervisor which means I don't know what people think we have I feel like some people think we have like 50 officers on a ship but we don't we have a lot of times it's just two officers find a call as a supervisor having to supervise and do their own administrative tasks as well as respond to calls themselves you know in a given shift you know plus some specialties such as you know detectives and a school resource officer and administrators like the chief and a captain you know the deal that they have to deal with the more significant cases they would go pull an officer off the street for you know an unreasonable period of time you know there's a ton of administrators off from budgeting to you know purchasing and scheduling and personnel and all those other things that you know our chief and our cabinet is supposed to do and they you know they still manage to work shifts I mean right now you're at the highest level of staffing we've had in a while which has certainly been you know a relief valve for us but you know 600 extra hours a year I mean it's a great paycheck but it takes its toll and again we're looking at officer wellness there you know we need that's part of staffing falls under that that umbrella but we are make more sense to pay more people for like just a full-time job than to pay people like you for so much overtime I'm sure you're thinking about this and I'm more I feel like it's been it's been no you're right you're right you're 100% correct you know you can come right up with that right now it is our conversation and you know we've been talking about it so you're 100% correct to look at the overtime figures that we've had average them out yeah and see if that we can create an additional person to come in but we want to make sure that when we do that we let let the public know why we're doing it to make sure that it's it's the right thing to do that was um so I think you're what I'm getting the feeling of like a part-time officer one of Tony and Doug Hoyt right who is before Tony so Montpelier has a has a program that they can train officers to be part-time officers I think it's a level two certification the only issue with that is that Tony and Doug and actually this department wants to make sure is that sometimes with a part-time officer you may not get someone who is capable or willing to have the same culture of commitment that a full-time officer in this department has so we want to make sure whoever yeah it's it's kind of tricky that that person's trained to the same level of expectations that they do on a daily basis because the last thing we want is somebody to come in here and screw it up oh yeah that's where a lot of the problems come from but you know I really did with officer with officer wellness where you officers overreact or react poorly imagine how an officer who's had two weeks of training you know a period of field training with other officers and now they're sort of in a situation that the rest of us are all full-time officers have been doing this for years sometimes you know multiple decades you're going to start somebody a part-time college student or something like that is willing to come in and work for that wage you know 15 bucks an hour versus 20 something you know you know basically the minimum requirements the minimum level of maturity the minimum experience you're going to throw them out on the street and expect the same level of service and the same level of no responsibility and you know and liability as well so to trade out I agree with that I grew up on the sea coast after like Maine I mean all those departments do that yeah and they overreacted in a lot of cases because they didn't you know they weren't really pleased on you should say they've got that they've got that mentality you know respectfully that mall caught mentality yeah yeah that's what we're trying to we're trying to avoid here we don't want that that's a national issue too I mean you know we may hold ourselves in a very high standard but you can look at any other state and that's a frustration of ours being lumped in because we now with this you know the whole police you know with the police is all the cops in the country there's thousands of departments hundreds of thousands of officers all the different levels of training culture education experience and we're all being lumped in together so all the effort we've put in now it is very frustrating and disheartening to have that sort of all that effort thrown into our face the department down south is paying 12 an officer 12 bucks an hour saying to you know a three-month academy and then putting them out on the street and you know just to have a warm body there did you make a very good point yes sure no so my name is Eric Jacobson I'm a resident of Montpelier one of the things about Montpelier generally that some of us are working on is to have a more diverse population emigrate here one of the problems is when we have situations that are not fortunate situations that we have recently in which one possibly two the unnecessarily what can you do in the short time to help prevent that kind of situation happening again we obviously have mentally helped people in the community and this is going to be a very tough time going forward they're going to be incidents like the ones we saw how can you prevent that kind of killing I I I don't know if I can I'm just being honest the only thing I can do is try to is try to put every every level layer of protection I possibly can within the community to hope that it doesn't happen again we could we could find somebody we could go on a call to deal with somebody who's going through a mental health crisis and then try to then move them over to our well we have a team to training but then move them over to soon we'll have an embedded social worker that'll be part of Washington County that will be responding with us and trying to get that person into treatment but we can't get them in a treatment if they don't want to go or they don't want to take the medication because their side effects to it and if something unfortunate happens like that but that doesn't mean that we don't try so I can't make that promise to you but I can't tell you that none of us wants to ever be in that situation and we're going to do everything we can to get people to help so we're not seeing repeat calls like that and there was one other thing that you had mentioned about trying to um trying to uh increase diversity within the state my experiences have been growing up my parents uh well my grandparents on both sides came out of Alabama and Mississippi and they migrated up to the larger metropolitan cities because there were jobs and so so there's that there's why there's diversity in my opinion in those in those other places but even in Vermont there's challenges here the social economic challenges here there's a lack of jobs here so if folks who are already living here in the state are having difficult time finding jobs that pay living wages um with lower tax rates and everything else then it's going to be very difficult to attract someone else to come up as well there's a professor Muhammad at Harvard who's making these proposals that I found quite interesting about having uh a more complex uh emergency intervention options and one of those is to have more dedicated people who are trained as social workers maybe Washington wide is sufficient I don't know maybe would you be open to that kind of thing you can see it's absolutely necessary to be uh the state of North Carolina is called a Boulder crisis team and every county has their own team I did this for several years and if you guys would put it away but it would be something that makes you look at it at a higher level yes no typically and typically the bigger agencies only have that but the beauty of it is is I have the I have the newest updated version that we did in Alamogordo on a usb drive on my desk right now that we will be implementing uh c it training for the officers here um not only just here but any other agency that comes in and just hey we're not going to charge you outlander speeds just come on over and get trained because it's not about us it's about making sure that all officers have the resources to keep and protect lives we'll we'll be doing that as soon as possible or the situation is extreme enough take them to Dr. Custody take them to the hospital for for evaluation so there is currently a 24 hour program you know where they have to have available obviously they're not right there with us at all hours a day and that that would be the greatest advantage that the chief is talking about having that embedded worker who when it's appropriate especially either they go in our in our stead or they ride with us to the incident and maybe take point on it instead of you know the armed officer who maybe is dealt with any number of other things and at any other number of skills going and trying to you know to deal with that situation inside of the tap that the professional come in and that's possible when it's safe to do so so it's obviously something we're removing cards if you want to you could probably google uh the team two then that's what it's called here what team two team two yes sir here's the comment and you're going to say this is one of the best partnerships between Washington County and and also peer networks and some mental health peer networks inside of something a lot so we run a peer bed here as well um up on huge street so we continue to have big partnerships which is a very good department here at the trustee I've heard so much about walking through county mental health that's actually like a national note bench wide of what you're going to do right because there's a lot of good things going on here that a lot of challenges still but a lot of problems that other places don't have very fortunate to be here first of all thank you I've already seen the results of your work by participating in BLM marches and speaking to your officers and they've uniformly been kind and cooperative peaceful so thank you for that I am giving you my card to volunteer sir I have 40 years of experience in operations management and organizational analysis I'm a professor at Norwich University I will volunteer to show you and your staff some novel methods for running focus groups analyzing the results developed I teach I taught survey design you know I teach applied statistics how to design surveys that that will be helpful to you rather than ambiguous and so on and that's all I just wanted you to know that you have support and I'm with you thank you we this is what we appreciate is is is being able to to listen to our community and take the help when we're offered the help and I'll be in touch thank you thank you there any other questions comments any other challenges anything else that we can answer and yes sir I don't like the colors on the new the new colors on the cruisers the black and the thing I liked it when they were white with blue that it was friendlier seeming this looks like every other department you know prowling around in black and I I I I don't know if it's a you know the first thing on your list but the third thing is put it before let's go back let's go back to the kinder gentler colors on my cruisers thank you we'll definitely have that conversation well we're gonna have to pay for that because I get national movement to go back from from police officer to peace officer peace there's an organization that facilitates that type of thing both in you know a nomenclature on the cruiser but also in the mindset so yeah like some of us are older like myself you know I grew up with feet the same same mindset very much so the nice thing about the cruisers is that they're full of equipment to help us do our work you know so we have you know all these tools in our belt we also have many in the in the car as well from ballistic shields to less lethal shotguns and launchers you know it's other you know flares and cones and things like that that help make either areas safe or you know help help us be more safe and keep the community more safe so that is the benefit of having them but I totally understand why it's such a benefit to be out on the on the foot or on the the bike and actually like in the community yeah there's a compromise to be had absolutely protecting yourselves extra with the COVID like going into certain situations like do you have n95 mask and face shields and all of that protective equipment to go because we realize that we're going from place to place to place potentially and we want to make sure that we're not bringing any contamination with us as we interact with the public yes in addition to the equipment we're also changing also change certain procedures like doing as many calls as possible by phone having people come out of wherever they are into the you know into the air and the light there's small things like that which can also be to be beneficial generally I've been really helpful yes exactly no thank you and we really appreciate it there's a pleasure to meet you we're going to do as many of these as we possibly can because I want to do my best to hear from everybody because I want to get to meet my bosses so thank you all very much thank you for your candor and please hold my feet to the fire when we're doing when we're doing something wrong