 First Wednesdays is sponsored by the Vermont Humanities Council and by the Kellogg Hubbard Library with video production supported by Orca Media. My name is Michelle Singer. I'm the Adult Programs Coordinator here at the library. We're happy to have you here with us tonight. First Wednesdays is a program of the Vermont Humanities Council that happens the first Wednesday of the month, October through May, in nine libraries around the state of Vermont. We are very pleased to be a host for this series and happy to have you here. We'd like to thank the Vermont Humanities Council sponsors and library sponsors who have helped us bring this lecture to us tonight. The underwriters are the Institute of Museum and Library Services through the Vermont Department of Libraries, the Peter Gilbert Endowment Fund, and Palmer Low Real Estate. We appreciate their support. Information and brochure for the first Wednesdays program are on the table and on the hall, as well as community input forms, which you're welcome to fill out tonight or take with you and fill out later. Please take this moment to silence your cell phones. Take note that there's a restroom at the back of the room. And I'd like to invite Tess Taylor, the Vermont Humanities Council Director of Community Programs, to introduce our speaker tonight. Thank you, Michelle. Thank you so much and thank you to the Kellogg Hubbard Library for everything you do for Vermont Humanities and our community. So, before I introduce our speaker tonight, I wanted to talk about, if anybody's been here yet to see, our new way of signing in. We still have our sign-in sheets that people prefer the old-fashioned way or the new way, which is to either use this adorable little tablet or even your cell phone. So, you silence your cell phone. We want you to do that, but you can use it. If you go to, if you see at the top of the screen there, it says bit.lyfw-mumpilier. If you go there, there'll be a really quick way to put your name, your first name, your last name, town you're from, and your email. And tomorrow, you'll receive a short email from us asking about your experience tonight. And it really is short and we don't use, we don't use this information for anything unless you check a box in that email tomorrow and say, yes, I want to be on your mailing list. And we don't share it either. So, it's a safe way to do it. It's a quick way to do it. And we think that it's pretty effective. So, I'm going to pass this little tablet around if you want to use that. Here you do it. Thank you for indulging me. And now on to tonight's speaker. Brandon Del Posa was appointed Chief of Police of Burlington, Vermont in September 2015. Prior to assuming leadership of Vermont's largest municipal police force, he served for 19 years in the New York City Police Department where he retired at the rank of Deputy Inspector. While at the NYPD, he commanded the sixth and fiftieth precincts served on the staff of the Police Commissioner and Chief of Department. From 2005 to 2007, he served as NYPD's Intelligent Liaison to the Arab Middle East and India based out of Jordan's capital city of Amman. Born in Brooklyn, New York, he began his police career in 1997 on patrol in the 67th precinct in East Flatbush. You're pretty far from home. Almost to the heart of it. Currently, Chief Del Posa was a member of the Police Executive Research Forum. It was on the 2016 recipient of its Gary Hayes Memorial Award for Police Leadership. A graduate of Dartmouth College, Chief Del Posa has completed the coursework for the doctorate in political philosophy from the City of New York Graduate Center. He also holds a Masters of Public Administration from the Kennedy School of Government where he is an inaugural 9-11 public service fellow and a Master of Arts in Criminal Justice from John Jay College where he was a John Reichenbach scholar. So we are so pleased and happy and lucky to have you here tonight, Chief Del Posa. Thanks. Yes, I was a young cop in East Flatbush. I worked down the street from Erasmus High School, which is where Bernie Sanders went to high school. Talking about being far from home, there is this precedent for Jewish guys from Brooklyn to come to Vermont and cause trouble. When I met Bernie for the first time, I thought I would bond with him by talking about, oh, I used to work down the street from where you went to high school. If you know his personality, he's having none of it. He's like, I brought you here to ask you about opioids. We're going to talk about opioids now. Basically, the vibe was I could care less that we were spiritual neighbors in Brooklyn. So thank you for having me. Thanks for the Vermont Council of Humanities for putting this together. So just to, you know, I see Chief Tony Fakos in the room, Chief of Montpelier. So I got to be careful what I say. I can't, you know, biggest police department this and that. No, no, we got to, he's here, Alan Gilbert as well, retired from the ACLU. He was well, and then Deputy Chief John Mirad, my Chief of Operations, who is a native Vermont there, actually. John left Underhill to go to college in a, he went to a college on the outskirts of Boston in Cambridge, joined the NYPD, and then after Stint there, went into the private sector, really, really missed police work. And I happened to have an opening for a number two, so I brought Deputy Chief Mirad back up. So thanks for, he's not like my bodyguard or something there in the back. He's like, so that's why there's this person in uniform back there. So thanks everybody for coming. So it's an interesting time in policing, and I guess I did have an op-ed in the New York Times about two weeks ago now about the use of force. I saw some folks had it printed out, and it goes back to the genesis of that in my mind anyway, for me as a writer, it goes back to a video I saw of a police incident in Brooklyn that happened in a synagogue. A man in emotional distress with a knife walked into a synagogue in Brooklyn. The rabbis called the police, and then somebody started filming. And what I saw with a deputy commissioner after the fact was the video of what happened in there made the news. And you had a police officer who's a conscientious good cop, I all accounts, but he's pointing a gun at the man with the knife and saying, drop the knife, drop the knife, drop the knife. And then the rabbis are to the right and they're saying, yeah, I can do my Yiddish accent, but I'm Jewish like, why do you have that knife? What are you thinking? What's going on? Is there something wrong? And then the cop for his part is screaming, drop the knife, drop the knife. And then the rabbis are in treating the person. And it ended tragically that the man put the knife down and walked away. But then came forward, grabbed it again, and ran towards the cop. The cop shot him and the man died. That's not what sparked my interest in the incident. It was the difference between the rabbis and the cop. Why was the cop issuing these loud orders? And why were the rabbis in treating the man? And it occurred to me, it wasn't, you know, because rabbis are holier than thou, because they understand this human psyche better. It's because they didn't have a gun. And if you could imagine a person with a knife... I can't direct to that statement. Sorry. Continue, please. Why? You said, why did they behave that way because they didn't have a gun? I can't accept that. Anyway, when we train as police officers, one of the ways that we're trained pretty uniformly, that when something comes to the point where you're pointing a gun, it's a life-and-death situation, you have to be decisive, and you have to make your intentions clear. And if you're going to use force, it has to be unambiguous. So you're pointing, drop that knife, drop the knife, and you're making it loud and clear. I've seen it time and time again in all sorts of training. If you are facing someone with a knife, I'm like this. As you see me now, and this gentleman in the front row has a knife, and I'm screaming at you. And I'm screaming, drop the knife, drop the knife, drop the knife. I don't talk like that. Then I think it would be absurd to scream those orders like that. It would come off as an empty-handed person screaming orders is absurd. And the rabbis are reacting normally in an important way, as people who wanted to be safe and didn't understand a situation. And then the police officer was reacting in a way that you can issue an ultimatum when you have a gun in your hand. It's the laws empowering you to do it, and you have the ability to make it clear this is a serious situation of ordering you to do something. It occurred to me that in American policing, a lot of times we just take what we've been taught and we do it for decades in basic ways, and we don't self-assess. And the op-ed that I wrote summed up by saying we should always have these guns to protect ourselves and to protect the public, but we should treat the people in crisis as if we didn't have them. It's an insurance policy. It's not a means to impose will. And so if you could imagine that, it would be a case of if somebody is menacing you with a weapon and you don't have a weapon instinctively almost all the time, you'll open the distance, try to put an object between you and them, and why are you doing this? What do you need? How can I help you? But you will have as a police officer a recourse to protect yourself with a firearm. I was going to say the biggest, except for tonight, where we have folks taking umbrage from the outset, the biggest objection I got from that, I thought I had a hard time looking over at Allen with the left wing in Vermont as a police officer. The most vitriolic, angry feedback I got ever as a person in uniform and a leader was from cops in that op-ed. When I wrote that, I got, John, you can attest to this, right? I mean, the hate mail I got from police officers about what I wrote, saying have a gun, but speak as if you don't have a gun. They said, you're just trying to get us killed. You don't take your job seriously. You're not man enough to be a cop and you shouldn't turn on your badge. And I didn't, bad and I, there are two, I think, strains to that. One was that this very old school thought that, you know, we are the law as men and women in uniform. We issue orders and people should respect them. And if you're in crisis or not, you will do as the police say, we have the right to issue those orders. Another strain, I think, and it's more relevant to what I want to talk about for a little bit tonight before this becomes a conversation, is police in America feel really beleaguered right now. I think the... Excuse me? Oh, I'm sorry. Police feel very beleaguered right now in a lot of ways. There's clearly a change. If you look at who we're electing in a lot of American cities as prosecutors, right? We're electing reform prosecutors. Sarah George is, in my Chittenden County state's attorney, is a reform prosecutor. In Philadelphia, Larry Krasner came in on the wave of reform. Chelsea Bhutan, excuse me for the name, in San Francisco, Rachel Rollins in Boston. And police officers understood where they stood in criminal justice, which is you take evidence and you take people, you bring them to a judge, you prosecute or prosecutes, and that's the system. We're not happy with the outcomes of that system in countless American cities. So cops are getting all sorts of different messages. You can arrest people day in and day out. I'll keep on looking in Chief Murad, and we're just not going to prosecute a lot of them, right? If there are people who are suffering from mental illness, they shouldn't be in the criminal justice system. I've ordered my police officers not to arrest anybody who possesses medication-assisted treatment medicines for opioid abuse without a prescription. That's not in the interest of justice. So I think, and now they have a chief saying, like the way you protect your life by pointing a gun at someone with a knife is all wrong. In fact, you shouldn't be doing it that way. And I just said that, you know, we're getting a lot of this mixed messages and uncertainty from our critics and reformers. And now, you know, we have a chief like just telling us, when you pull out the gun the way you're trained and point it and say, drop the knife, that's wrong too. So where I was, I was less sympathetic for the people who just say tough police, we're going to issue orders. But very sympathetic to police officers who are like, what are we doing in our profession now? Where do we stand in policing in America? And I think that, you know, we owe ourselves and our communities and our police an explanation and we're in flux right now because it's very difficult to be in a profession where so much is at stake. The work is so critical. The tools are either coercive or deadly and yet we don't exactly know what we expect. It's a profession now where like, for example, in Burlington, you're expected to film everything you do and then hand it over to the government and the government can use it as evidence against you. So, and that's a basic condition of your employment. It's a big challenge. So someone, they mentioned when they wrote the, whoever have a can bio that you can look up online and it says that I just submitted my dissertation from my PhD in political philosophy to my committee. So it took forever but now they're sitting on it making me nervous. We'll see what happens with that. But it's about policing and democracy, right? So it's about what a liberal democracy should expect of its police. And I think that just a few remarks on that, because this is the Humanities Council. This is a degree in PhD in philosophy, humanities. So it's kind of apropos. I think that you'll never hear me and you haven't heard me yet use the term law enforcement. I don't call myself law enforcement. I don't call my cops law enforcement officers. They do enforce the law. But I think that's a very narrow view of what they do and why it's important. I think that when people refer to themselves as law enforcement officers, it captures something very basic and elemental about what policing is, but it misses what makes policing so important, like the ends of policing. So to ask me what, and it's what I argue and what I write, what police do in America, they ought to do, is the first is protect and rescue people in danger. Your first obligation as a police officer is to protect and rescue people who are facing harms. And if anything, the law just empowers you as an officer to do that, right? And I think that if you've heard of it, there's this saying, Max Weber, the sociologist says, a state is the entity that successfully cleans monopoly on the use of force. And I don't know if you folks have heard that, right? See some nods. I don't think that's true. If you think about it, if there's a child, I'll just give you an obvious case, like a child getting attacked in the street by an adult, and the child's clearly just trying to defend itself. Is it only the police that can go rescue that child? I mean, I'll ask the chief if you responded to a call where there was a child getting assaulted and there was an adult doing the assault, and then some bystander came and ripped that person off and threw him to the ground. Would you say you had no right to do that? You had to wait till I got there? Probably not, right? So I don't think the police have a monopoly on the use of force in a democracy. I think Weber got that a little bit wrong. I think that any person has a natural right to defend themselves and other innocent people, too. The difference is that the police embody the state's promise to do that, right? If you agree to enter into a state, this is like getting to political philosophy, and you agree to give up certain rights and pay taxes and be part of a scheme of cooperation, it's because the state turns the right of one person to protect another person into an obligation to do it, right? But the other thing that follows from that obligation is an obligation to do two other things, do it professionally and do it impartially. These are two citizens that are involved in a dispute or a fight, and if you have to choose a priority, you choose the victim over the attacker. That doesn't mean that the person who's doing the attack has no rights whatsoever. That doesn't mean you get to be sloppy or unprofessional or heavy-handed in your use of force. You have to protect yourselves. You have to protect the public. But what makes policing special in my mind is, number one, the obligation to protect and rescue the innocent. And number two, the fact that you have to do it professionally in a way that just accords the right value to everybody, the life of everybody involved. And I think that when we call ourselves law enforcement and not police, we lose a little bit of sight of that. I think we'd be well-served as a profession to regain that idea. The second power I think that the police have is the power to... the conventional one I just talked about, bring people and evidence to a judge. But then the question is to what end, right? Why do we bring people and evidence to a judge? Is it always to punish and incarcerate? Sometimes, yes. I mean, there are certain things you do where you ought to be imprisoned. But we have this very, very powerful mechanism called the court system, which is supposed to determine to a reasonable degree of certainty whether somebody actually did something or not. And once you determine what they've done, what do you do with them? Like, we're finally coming to some conclusions in Vermont, for example. If you are in jail because you are addicted to opioids, I'm happy to say in Vermont you will receive medication-assisted treatment. 43% or 45% of the prisoners in Vermont screen positive for opioid addiction and receive buprenorphine or methadone. Because we've realized that, like, the state doesn't merely have an obligation to figure out what you did and then put you in a cell for it, but try to correct some of the conditions. So, second power of the police is to bring people in evidence to the magistrate. But what the magistrate does matters, right? What the magistrate does bears on the legitimacy of bringing people to him or her in the first place. And then the third power is, in my mind, the most interesting to me, because I don't think we often phrase it this way, which is to broker and enforce, like, social cooperation in our public spaces. And I think if you think a lot about what police do, whether it's traffic enforcement, some of the traffic enforcement is clearly about safety, you know, whether you're drunk or speeding or something like that. But so much of traffic enforcement is just making people's lives livable in a shared space, right? So much of it is about cooperation, drinking in public. There's nothing inherently immoral about having a drink on your property versus a sidewalk. Although, Chief Mirrod and I did argue about that for an hour and a half once on the way home from the, I think just to needle me, apparently. But I do think that there's no inherent moral wrong with having alcohol on one side of the street or the property, you know, or the other. But in New Orleans, anything goes, right? But it's about to the extent to which you drinking and getting drunk is socially uncooperative, right? Protests are an example of an event in which, you know, you have a space that's normally consigned to cars driving down or people walking, but there's a political need to claim that space and whether it should be a permitted protest or whether the police should say, you know what, this is an extraordinary circumstance. There's no permit. That's about the cooperative use of space. The same thing with countless laws that police enforce, especially in big, dense cities. And I think if we look at where police have a lot of, not to say liability, but a lot of difficulties that we don't always fairly adjudicate the way we ask people to cooperate in spaces. We say, you know, protestors have to have a permit and for that reason, you know, in fact, I'm looking at the ACLU, even they admit that sometimes you need a permit to have a protest, occasionally. In fact, I cite their documents when I say that. But there are times where I don't think we'd ask for one, right? If there was some sort of, I could think of political circumstances that something happens very, very quickly, that's of extreme importance to the nation and people take to the streets. You know, let's say, for example, like, you know, a civil rights leader is assassinated. Within an hour, there's a crowd of 1,000. Are we going to say, we're breaking this up? You need a permit? I think that's a great time to let that protest go. But it's about cooperative uses of spaces. If you were to just claim the intersection every day, I'll give you an example. Like, when gay marriage was legalized in New York State, not nationwide with the Supreme Court, but in New York State in 2011, I commanded the precinct that covered the Stonewall Inn, which was the birthplace of gay civil rights, at least on the East Coast, if not the nation. And it was when the riots there happened in 1969, they were a response to police brutality against gays in the Stonewall Inn. You know, it was a horrible time for policing and for history and for gay rights in general. And now tonight, in 2011, gay marriage is legalized. There's thousands of people in the street. They are drinking. They're urinating. They're using sound reproduction devices without a permit and they're blocking traffic. Did I say, this is uncooperative use of space? No. I said, we had police detectives proposing to the laws of their lodge in front of the Stonewall and cops doing the can-can with the dancers that they were, you know, in 1969 would have been fighting. However, like a few weeks later, it was the 9th annual march for vegetarianism. And they said, can we take the street without a permit? And I said, no, you can't. Why not? And I said, that would be pretty uncooperative. And they said, what do you mean? And I said, well, this is the 9th annual march. We all understand the precepts of vegetarianism. This is not like a major crisis. If you wanted to block traffic, we needed to do this in a way that better accounted for your intent. So, you know, we have to be very mindful about the way in which we, and it's a very difficult job, I think, to properly broker social cooperation. And I think if you look at the star, you remember the Starbucks incident in Philadelphia where two black men were there without buying anything and they were arrested. I think that's another illustrative incident. Trust pass is a law. And if you are the manager or owner of a property and you have custodial control of it, you can say, I rescind permission for this person to be in this space. And Starbucks had a policy, apparently, if you don't buy anything, we can kick you out of that space or ask you to leave. And if you don't leave, we can arrest you. And so these two African-American men were in the Starbucks and written house square in Philadelphia, which is the nicest neighborhood in Philadelphia, right there downtown. They didn't buy anything. Manager comes up to them and says, you know, or maybe just calls the police. They have to leave. We all know how this goes. If you haven't heard the story, just Google it. It comes up very quickly. And the police were very, very meticulous about their approach. They explained the trust pass law. They gave the people an opportunity to leave. They acknowledged that the manager has authority to decide who can be in here and have rescinded it. And they actually started, if you look at the video, moving the chairs and tables away from the two gentlemen. So if there was a fight, the woman would get hurt with the furniture. So they very, very, very, very fastidiously adhere to all the requirements of the law. And I think most of us, Larry Krause and the reform prosecutors, I'm not prosecuting this, right? They were arrested for trust pass. So the question is in your intuitions, if you think this was egregious and I do, what was wrong about it? It wasn't that the law was unambiguous. It wasn't that the officers had any fact patterns wrong. They had a custodial manager of the premises who was invoking the trust pass law. The problem was, in my mind anyway, that the reasons that they were giving for brokering that type of cooperation, that use of space, weren't reasons that applied equally to every American. And I'll give you a point. I was in Seattle in Madison. Anybody been to Seattle? It's Vermont. There's a tunnel from here to Seattle. Like a spiritual, like a, you just get transported from, it's a city in front of the water with mountains around it. Super liberal socialists on the city council. Vermont, Burlington, Seattle, all the same. So I was there in Madison Park, which is this very, very, very wealthy community there. Just walking around. My wife and I went into the Starbucks. We picked up a newspaper without paying for it in Reddit. We went right into the bathroom, used the bathroom, sat there, looked at our phones and by a thing and left. Was anybody ever going to call the police on us and ask us to leave? No. And I think that one of the biggest challenges police have is when they have these types of laws that they are asked to enforce to keep our social environments and our shared environments moving smoothly, whether it's protest, drinking, urination, trust pass. They have tremendous discretion. Some laws like disorderly conduct are completely under-determined. Disorderly conduct basically says, in fact, I feel like Alan could just come up and you're not going to do it. You're tired. You're out of the game. I'm away from that. You're away from that, mercifully. Completely under-determined. It just says basically, don't be boisterous. Don't be loud. Don't get in a fight. And the police have discretion at two levels. Number one, to determine what being boisterous or loud or excessive means. And then to enforce the law at all. All of these minor offenses, from nonviolent misdemeanors down, we have discretion about whether to enforce or not, right? So we have the discretion to enforce disorderly conduct. And not only do you have the discretion, but the law itself is vague, right? You also do have case law, though. No, no, no, that's correct. No, there's governing case law. So that's a great point. Like the case law for speech in Vermont up in our county is that for language, for language to be fighting words, it has to be equivalent to throwing a lit match into a pool of gasoline. That's actually the judge's statement. And she's nodding. Thank you. Bye, Pesta. Yeah, right. So that does delineate the police powers. And thank you for bringing that up. But nonetheless, even if the case law, so just to push back a little, what does throwing a lit match into gasoline look like in terms of spoken language? Well, according to the Burlington Police Department and the prosecutors, changes in fluctuations in volume of voice enables them to perform an arrest on somebody. I mean, political speech. That's not the guidance at all that we give to our police officers. And I know that Sarah George has a long record of declining to prosecute those types of cases. But the fact that we just can have this uncertain conversation, I think, speaks to the underdetermination of disorderly conduct. And unlike, for example, robbery or something like that, which is a use of force to take and retain property. That's the case law around that is much narrower. But when you look at disorderly conduct, even talking about modulation of voice, that is also extraordinarily subjective if you're saying that's the test. A match into gasoline. I'm saying that's a test. That's the test according to our current Attorney General of Vermont. Right. No, no, no. So fair enough. Right. So that's the, that or, again, I'm sticking with it, match into gasoline. All right. So that's, in fact, the judge's finding. What does that mean on the street? I'm sick. So what that person just said, it came to throwing matches into gasoline. And so what we're relying on, and it's why it matters to have good, fair, well-educated cops, is the interpretation of the statute and then whether to enforce it or not. And one of the worries we have as a legacy in America is that we oftentimes enforce laws for reasons that don't treat citizens as equals. When we use our discretion or make a determination about the use of space, whether we pull over a car or not, it's for reasons that I think a lot of times you can say to yourself, you know, that would apply to him, but not me or me to not him. Or if a wealthy person from one of the condominiums in the house where I came down into the Starbucks in a shearling coat and didn't order anything, I don't think they'd have the police called on them. And so I guess what I'm saying is, as far as American policing is that there's a lot of confusion right now about our expectations. I mean, you might, in your mind, know exactly what you want of the police. I'm saying as a nation, we're asking them, we have a president that says one thing, elected officials that say another, even in Vermont, prosecutor to prosecutor, county to county, it differs. But one of the things I think it would be helpful to get away from, and I brought this up with my initial anecdote, is just saying, well, we've always done it this way, so we'll continue to do it this way, which is we're trained that when we're facing a deadly weapon, we have our gun out and we bark orders because it's a very tense situation and I have to be unambiguous. Like maybe, you know, there's a different way of doing that. You know, I don't, in my experience, see British police screaming at people to do things because they don't have guns on them. So number one, the way we've always done it is not the way to continue to do it. Number two, I think it behooves us all to get away from, we are law enforcement officers, but to what end? I consider myself a police officer and that means that I help regulate situations, diffuse difficult situations, bring people to the attention of the court, broker social cooperation, law enforcement is only one of the many things I do and it gives me the power under the law to do it, but it's not the end in itself. So I think we don't want to conceptually entrap ourselves as police officers into thinking we're law enforcement, although that's a very important part of what we do. And then the third thing is we have a duty to protect and rescue. That comes first. And if we have to choose between protecting and rescuing or enforcing a statute, I think that the protection of the citizen comes first and I think that we have to really, the best case to illustrate that is drug laws, right? Is addiction treatment. And addiction treatment is we decided if you have some buprenorphine on you, which is a medication-assisted treatment for opioids and you don't have a prescription and you're taking it and clinically it's shown to reduce cravings, save lives, prevent overdoses, is my interest in helping that addicted person take the medicine that will keep them alive or enforcing a statute that says they need a prescription for it. If you're saying that our first job is to protect and rescue, then I think it's not to arrest them. It's to make sure that they get the treatment they need. I think that protection and rescue is a duty on the part of the police, but it's also a duty that we have to execute very professionally and also according everybody, the sanctity of their life. And the last thing, and I just, I'm going back to what I said, is I think that we need to think more carefully about the way we enforce these very low-level violations, not to say we shouldn't, but what's the end of doing it? Is it just to say, that's the law, you shouldn't have been drinking, you shouldn't have been in the street without a permit, are you going to enforce that, or are you really, really trying to broker social cooperation? The gift that police officers have of discretion is a tremendous, tremendous power that they're given, right? To say not only is there a law that you have to enforce, but you get to choose whether it's brought to the court or not. That's your choice. And that's a very, very power. That is one of the most powerful things in a democracy. I mean, to some extent, like judges aren't even, well, they do, but it really is akin to a very profound judicial power. And so, what I think that we need to do as Americans and as police officers, is when we're brokering these low-level offenses, is really understand are the reasons we're providing to people for what we do, reasons to treat them as equal citizens, right? Can you say to yourself the reason that that officer just gave him or her or this other person for doing what they're doing, charging or not, are they reasons that make them feel as equals? And I think we can go back to a lot of instances in America where we failed that test. I think we'd gain a lot of trust right away if we really strictly adhere to that rule. So that's sort of like from a philosophical, humanities perspective, like where my head is at with American policing. I know there are some people that had some really interesting points to make or disagreed from the outset. But at this point, I guess, if anyone has any questions or comments, I'd love to start a conversation. Yeah, please. My question has to do with this discretion and how it applies to political speech. From my perspective, Burlington, you know, before you were chief of police, but continuing while you were chief of police, had a serious problem of not respecting First Amendment right. And, you know, it's bad enough, you know, to not be respecting First Amendment right. But when it's being done in an apparently politically biased manner where it seems to be people with certain political views have their speech restricted, they basically agree with sort of the Burlington establishment. The left-wing, you know, pro-democrat or progressive point of view are allowed to say lock traffic, including ambulances. People with other points of views are heavily restricted, such as when they restricted people from protesting outside of women's health clinics, but they only stop people from protesting outside of abortion clinics, not women's health clinics that don't perform abortion. They allowed people to protest outside of other health clinics that didn't perform abortions. Or, you know, restricting freedom of speech on Church Street, like restricting people from protesting outside of near a Barack Obama campaign table and putting people in jail and persecuting for them for that. Or there was a case, I don't know the details of it, because no real details were given, but there was a case where they used a Church Street Chuss Pass Ordinance which actually passed after the Obama campaign incident. The guy who prosecuted that case was the guy who introduced it into the Church Street Chuss Pass Ordinance. And they used that against a guy who was quote-unquote, aggressively counter-protesting. This was the bus driver's Ron Strike. Right. And they banned someone from Church Street, I'm not sure for how long, for aggressively counter-protesting. I don't think that would have happened had the person's point of view been different from that. For instance, like when the UVM college students were blocking traffic near the hospital. Right. You know, and I could go on and I can think of like a dozen cases off the top of my head. I won't name some of them because, you know, to protect the privacy of some of the people. But there's cases where, you know, people were said they're not allowed to criticize the police in front of the police. Right, yeah. When they were holding, you know, they were carrying or are sometimes referred to, erroneously referred to as assault weapons. Some of their, I assume they were some way out of the game, but they were fully out. I assume they were some way out of their carrying. Some way out of my vehicles in Burlington. And the police told people that they're not paying them. A couple of questions, please. And so, I'm just wondering what's the, you know, why is there this discrepancy in how political speech is treated in the city of Burlington? So the only person that I've, that my police department has arrested for political speech is Ben from Ben & Jerry's. Because he insisted on being arrested. He said, I'm not going to stop replicating the sound of an F-35 until you arrest me. I remember I was on the ski lift at J.P.P. when I got a call from Robert Appel, the civil rights attorney, saying, Brandon, when are you guys going to arrest Ben from Ben & Jerry's? And I said, hold on. And I hung up the phone. I took my mitt and off, called up the cops. And they said, yep, he's rotting around in a huge trailer, blaring all this sound. And I said, okay, arrest him. So at least as far as what I've got, we haven't arrested anyone for political speech. Now, you talk about the students, the Black Lives Matter students blocking Main Street. Yeah, I said that we were not going to arrest any of them. And when we talk about the time, place, and manner in which you can have political speech, they had for weeks been trying to get the attention of their administration. They were not able to meet with Tom Sullivan. He were both meeting with those students. They did some protest actions within the UVM building. They were not able to meet with him. And then they went and for about two or three hours they blocked traffic. Now, one of the things that police do is say, you're blocking traffic. It's going to cause a delay. So get out of the street. I'm going to arrest you. We've actually, until then, had never tested that in Rush Hour in Burlington. There's no one who'd actually done it. And I'll tell you, they actually did block traffic and they did cause a delay. And I said, if you do this, you've made, you have on a one-time basis, blocked traffic to get the attention of the city and the university because you felt like you were being ignored. And it's about race in America and about feeling ignored as a person of color. And not only do we have a history of ignoring them but also enslaving them and lynching, segregating. I said, you have a claim on this space for tonight. But you did block traffic and you did delay ambulances and your major point, if you do it again, you'll be arrested. And you know what they did? They didn't do it again. They said, we're going to take our protest back inside. As far as the people protesting in front of Planned Parenthood, like, I haven't enforced any of that. But if they're not blocking the doorway and they're not blocking pedestrian traffic or at least allowing people to go through, they can protest about whatever they want. Charges were brought against somebody because they were outside of the no protest. But the vehicle was parked in a public parking spot and they had a pro-life bumper sticker. I can't adjudicate that, but I wasn't there for that. I'll take that at face value. Political speech should be one of the most highly protected forms of speech, regardless of content. I mean, that's clear. That's different than recreational speech or playing a trombone or throwing a frisbee or drinking and urinating. I think that we have to give a very, very wide berth for political speech. And so I can't go on a case-by-case basis and adjudicate these incidents with you. I mean, in at least six cases, I've had my free speech restricted within the city of Burlington. And I can think of at least six other instances where other people have had their free speech restricted. Yeah, I mean, I don't... Again, like, I... We have not cited or... The only person that has taken any enforcement action against in this regard is... Or dispersed at all. I mean, you know, is Ben from Ben & Jerry's. I can only say for the last four years and three months. I was forced to leave. I was criticizing Burlington Police for carrying... It's okay. No, no, let's not. We can return to that. It's not a question per se. He's wondering about the... I don't want to put words in your mouth, but about the priorities of how we prioritize political speech and are we giving... Like I just said, at the end of my talk, we need to give reasons to treat people as equals. What I hear you're saying is that we often don't give reasons to treat you as equals. If you're a liberal, you get the nice reason. And if you're conservative, we break up the march and arrest you. I'm saying that as in a matter of enforcement, that hasn't been borne out under my leadership. But I have heard what you're talking about with the Planned Parenthood. You get down to City Hall Park. I'm not City Hall Park. It's Waterfront Park. Right. For criticizing police who are carrying so-called assault rifles. You can criticize me anytime, if you want to... Excuse me, though. There are a number of reasons. No, no, let's... And I, for one reason... Sure. Because I believe personally, and I'd like to give everybody a chance, but one of my major concerns is how we deal with people with mental illness. Right. And if you'd address that, I think that would help this community. If we talk about this community, we have the chief of this community made the choice to come here tonight. No, no, no. No, no, of course not. No, no, I don't mean that. Mental health is, if you ask police officers right now what the biggest crisis is that affects the quality of life in their cities and what is claiming the most human lives, it would be the opioid crisis. But then if you ask them what the biggest long-term problem is in American policing, it's mental health. Mental health intersects with homelessness, intersects with substance abuse, intersects with crime, and the behavioral health crises that people in mental distress have. I mean, if you look at the last two people that the Burlington Police Department shot and unfortunately killed people in mental health crises in 2013 and 2016, one of the things... It's easy for me to say this because it's a state-level problem, but there's not enough inpatient mental health treatment available in Vermont. Once the hurricane came and closed the facility... Where was the facility, Tony? It's up in Berlin. Yeah. That was a biblical flood for mental health in Vermont. We lost the capacity to give enough inpatient treatment to people. We also don't have adequate drop-in or outpatient psychiatric treatment anywhere in the state. And so what you get are... We have a gentleman, some of you might know him. I'm sure Alan could guess his name, but he has had 1,300 contacts with the police in the last seven or eight years. Over, oh, God, close to 200 arrests, and they're all mental health related because he has episodes where he either gets violent or disruptive or literally swings tennis rackets at people's heads. Pure childhood trauma intersecting with mental health and alcoholism. The state doesn't know what to do with him, right? So I think we need a real profound investment. Scholars will be able to talk about this better than me, but it goes back to legitimate move to de-institutionalize a lot of people, I guess in the 70s and 80s. And then a pendulum that swing all the way in favor of de-institutionalizing because we were overdoing it. We now have a really diminished capacity to give inpatient treatment to the people who need it. And I think police officers get very resentful because for us it's an externality. There's a system that doesn't give adequate care to people in mental health crises. Vermont is very low to impose medical treatment on people for mental health. It takes very hard to get court order to medicate someone against their will. And then when they are not institutionalized and not medicated and they're on the street in our cities, meaning Rutland, Burlington, Montpelier, of course, it's the cops that have to deal with it. And I don't know if you want to, I often call on John because he leads operations, but do you think our cops feel a bit resentful about just having to deal with these problems again and again? I think they feel stressed by having to address the same folks routinely and feeling like they're not supported at other ends of the spectrum and so far as once they prevent someone from harming themselves or others, what is done for that? And there is no second step. Yeah. It's bringing folks to the same institutions that have limited resources and put them back out. So if you ask what we have, after our use of force incident against Phil Grenin where we had a four-hour standoff that resulted in Mr. Grenin coming out of a bathroom with knives in his hands and the police officers shooting and killing him, we developed a really, really, and I mean this world-class capacity to isolate and contain people safely and then negotiate with them. It involves, so one of the things that I think separates policing from social work is police don't only have an obligation to solve a problem using communications and those types of behavioral health interventions, but also to physically control a scene, right? So if somebody's barricaded, if somebody's locked in a room, if somebody is out in the open but they're armed, you need special tools and tactics to contain them and that's what we specialize in and that's what we're getting better and better at every day and we will contain that person now. You know, if they're in a room armed, if it takes all day, we'll make sure that they're safely contained in the room, we'll negotiate with them, if anything they'll end up just passing out from exhaustion and we'll wait for that. But then once you bring that person to help, to help, help seems to be very shallow in most cases. You know, we went through a big soul searching with these two violent incidents where you have a man who killed his wife with a hatchet on Hyde Street with a cleaver. I was there for that, cleaved her head open and killed her and then you have a woman who shot the person who's supposed to give her shooting lessons and both of these people have severe mental health problems. The prosecutor at the state level, at the county level, says, I don't think they're fit for prosecution. The state says, I don't know if I'm going to institutionalize them. The governor says, I think you need to take a second look and then T. J. Donovan says, why are you dumping this on my lap? I don't mean that in an accusatory way. The governor has literally said, I want you to look at what Sarah George's declined to prosecute. Like that's a broken system, if you ask me. The system at all of its points was ill-equipped to deal with these very violent people who clearly had mental illness. Is it a prosecutorial issue? Is it an institutionalization issue? Is it a county thing or a state thing? We're still figuring that out right now. Yeah. Add something as well. When we talk about mental health and law enforcement perspective, and I just, I was in Chicago and presented it with Murray Moulton as well as Kristen Chandler from what we call Team 2 at the International Police. We did this also back in 2016. At times one of the things I talk about though is there is a public expectation or perceived expectation of perfection on the part of law enforcement which further exacerbates exactly what the chief is just saying. What is the next level of system? What we know so clearly is when something has a tragic ending, everybody knows that. The question is, the police need more training. In some cases that very well may be the case. However, what is not also out there, which is the norm, is the fantastic work that our police officers and our troopers are doing every single day with mental health clinicians, with street interventionists, and nobody knows about that. I'm just giving you one example in my play that was from early in the year. In a situation where somebody was very severely in a severe crisis that stabbed himself a couple of times so we had to, in that rescue mode, we had to do everything we could to assist. We had EMS, we had our clinicians from Washington Mental Health, and we had our negotiator as well as the other things that we could isolate and contain. That situation ended up in a very difficult situation because of beanbag, fire from a shotgun, to at least stop the advance against the police because we had the resources. There's a big difference. The police officers were able to contain and manage that. When we did a press release on, after that, it stopped the advance, continued dialogue, a little while later, and this is after he also was further harming himself, but then later he put the knife down. Totally compliant, got him on a stretcher, got him in the life-saving health that he needed. Because that was such a significant incident. The press didn't cover it. We did a press release on that. Had I said the Montpelier Police Department shot an African-American male or somebody of color with a shotgun, which is what we did, it would have had a very different reaction. My point is that was a really extreme case, but the other work, when you talk somebody down, when you do all these things that she was talking about, that's what happens, that's the norm. I just want to say, but in our tragic situations, which we always definitely want to learn, everything we can, what can we do better? I absolutely support the ISAP training per 30, which you were involved with back in 2016, and rethinking use of force. That is exactly where we are evolving too, and if you're not from Montpelier, question your departments. How many of your officers are trained as negotiators? And I will tell you right now that there aren't enough that are trained in that. But anyway, I just wanted to say that it's an expectation of perfection, and then where we fail as a society is what are we doing for to quote the governor, Vermont's most vulnerable, and that's who we are all really trying to make sure. I think there's an important, I think the Chief makes really good points, because there is this very high expectation on police, and there's a difference between departments that are not up to speed in their training, or their policies, their values, their expectations, and then the outcome is a product of that, right? It's the result of being behind the times and being asleep at the wheel, and then not responding properly to a crisis. That's a lot, that's different than policing is inherently an unstable and chaotic situation, and there will always be instances in which an officer's judgment a situation develops faster than we can control it, and I think that a lot of times the public blurs the distinction between, you know, unfortunately some agencies that just haven't had the incentive to innovate, and then agencies that are really on the ball but have an unfortunate outcome, and then within that, of course, we've seen it. I mean, there's a very, very disturbing, and this is not about policing, it's about corrections, but if you've had seven days, very disturbing article about conduct and corrections today. There are also just bad actors, bad employees. If you're a bad employee in most businesses, maybe you engage in fraud, or petty theft, and policing other people's innocent lives are on the line, so we have a very, very high standard to meet for recruiting and training the right people, but there's three things at work. There's like agencies that are behind the times, very, very few to know agencies are like that in Vermont. I think we're lucky in that regard, and then the bigger cities in Vermont actually I think are very much on the ball with contemporary training, and then you just have situations that are just so chaotic that they go beyond your ability to control them. Everything is time compressed, and officers are under stress, they have tunnel vision, and then there's just bad actors, right, which is another thing that happens in all parts of society, but in policing it's a horrible one, it happens, because the stakes are so high. Yeah, either, I don't know, you can negotiate who goes. The question I have is, what are we going to do about the agencies and officers that are behind the times, because that exists in this state, you know, the Randolph police chief beat his wife like a year ago, a year and a half ago, and he's no longer the police chief, and the Northfield police chief, the town I live in, he planted evidence on a person that he arrested when he was working for Berlin, but there are bad actors. Right. And you're drawing attention to the ones that have come to the press, so more broadly, because I can't go into the, I'm not going to go into the details of planting evidence, allegations in Northfield per se, but one of the things that folks have to remember is that police chiefs work for you, right, and cops work, I work for you, especially if you're in Burlington, I work directly for you, not just in some big constitutional way, and the point is, I think that you know, appointed by a mayor and approved by a city council and a lot of times if you look at the reaction in the press or the way activism goes, it goes directly from the citizen to the chief of police, from the citizen to the cop, so we protest, the news we'll be writing about the police, the question in my mind that never goes answered is like what do city councils and mayors expect when they appoint chiefs of police? What kind of men and women are they appointing? What kind of standards are they holding them to? How are they evaluating them? What kind of metrics are they going to use for performance? And one of the disservices that I think police traditionally have done, and I'm looking at, you know, how many years have you been doing this? 34. 34, I want to tell you how I feel like a young man. I'm up like 20, 23 years. So 34 years, 23 years, especially like right in the 90s and the 80s cops are like, listen, you don't understand what we do. You can't understand what we do unless you've walked in our shoes. We would not only say that to citizens, not only say that if you're single, you want to impress somebody at the bar, you'll never understand what I've seen. You know, and then give them the thousand-yard stare. They we would also say that to our elected officials. I mean, not in so many words, not disrespectfully, but you'd say like mayor, listen, this is policing. Crime goes up. You're going to have a hard time getting re-elected. And don't worry, I got it. I'm the chief. You can't quite understand what we police do, but hey, we got it. And, you know, don't worry about it and don't question what we do, and it's something that it takes it takes decades to learn the you know, the truth. I mean, you agree sort of with what I'm saying? There's a mystique. There's always a mystique about policing. So one of the things that we're liable for is not empowering our elected officials to understand how to lead us. And one of the things I said to my mayor was like, whether you like it or not, my job is to teach you enough about policing that you understand the standards, that you'll basically be responsible for my decisions. You know, not in a, like, slight of hand way. So I think to answer your question, like, citizens do not just to hold the police accountable, men and women who appoint the police accountable. Like, I'm under the executive branch. I mean, the executive branch of government, I have an executive branch boss, that boss appoints me, that executive branch city council approves me. And if you're not satisfied with me, like, there are men and women who gave me this job. And then we also have to make sure that they understand the expectations these elected officials and the police owe them an explanation of what we do so they can make the right educated decisions about our actions, right? We've gotten away with the law by keeping that old murky and obfuscated. But I think that the chain of command is actually pretty clear, and it begins with the citizens. Yeah, and that's a couple of years, because I think that I've heard from a lot of representatives that they're not willing to take this oversight of our police agents. Right, and I know that hand go up. So just to be clear, I also don't, that doesn't necessarily mean, like, that I would like outside citizens and officials, like, they're directly imposing discipline on cops. Like, meaning, like, a board of like, there's no other government agencies I know where, like, just a group of citizens like disciplines the employee. But nonetheless, we need to have, again, I'm just picking because I'm in a city, mayors and city councilors who know what to expect of us and hold us accountable for it and choose chiefs based on on a really well-educated view of what the citizens expect and what chiefs ought to be able to bring to the table. I think that's, I think we're missing, I'm just reiterating that. I think we're missing a little bit of that. You had your hand up for it, yeah. That's actually a really great setup. What's running through my mind is also what you said earlier about the scenario with the rabbi and the police officer. And one state that has acted to draw a line, so to speak, that you're talking about is California with their use of force as a last result and I'm afraid I'm not terribly familiar yet with that one. But I welcome your thoughts about how helpful or unhelpful that would be and why. Yeah, so the Supreme Court case that governs US Supreme Court, not Vermont Supreme Court is Graham V. Conner, Graham versus Conner. And it talks about the is the use of force reasonable from the perspective of a reasonable officer who had the knowledge that a cop would have had in that situation. I'm in the middle of a situation it's time compressed, I'm under stress confronting the facts as they come to me. An average police officer I make a decision and I use force. The Supreme Court says is that force reasonable based on the perspective of I'm being legally and precise, but an everyday police officer who knew what the police officer at the time knew. That's the standard. And it's a standard that is very permissive in the use of force. The officer who's having the facts tried against him or her just has to articulate number one they have to be shown as just a reasonable officer. Number two they have to show that they had a certain knowledge of the facts at the time that they feared for their safety or someone else's safety and they use force. And there's not any distinctions about the expertise of the force, the professionalism, it's a fairly when I say a low bar, I don't think it's an appropriately low it's the nation's bar for many years now. But what California did was raise that a bit. One of the things they did to change it was say it's not a reasonable officer but a reasonable person. It took the standard away from the officer and put it into the citizen's hands. I think that what you'll see by way of answering a question about what I feel about that police in a lot of places have resisted imposing standards in their own agencies that are above the Supreme Court standard. They worry what the unions would say they worry that it would hamstring them they worry that cops may hesitate to use force that would have been constitutionally allowed because of a higher standard and that might result in cops getting hurt. However we're finding that as citizens Americans are less and less comfortable with what is this prevailing standard and so you're seeing in places like California the state you can always impose a higher standard when it comes to according citizens' liberties or protections you can always impose a higher standard than the Supreme Court. You can never go below it. That's basically how the law works. What California did was impose a higher standard and I think that police can have one or two approaches. We can all just hunker down and wait for individual states to impose higher standards in the Supreme Court maybe have a new Supreme Court case or we can go back to what I said at the beginning about what our duty to protect means and that's to professionalize or we can ourselves say we will train ourselves in a way that raises our standard ourselves and you're seeing a lot of police agencies actually passing their own use of force policies that are similar they don't have the exact same phrasing as California's but they're like Camden, New Jersey, Seattle New York City and we're drafting a new policy in Burlington and we have written standards that professionalize us at a higher bar than the Supreme Court but cops worry about that because when it comes down to it if their life is on the line just any human being would say if it's good enough for the Supreme Court it's good enough for me and then Americans are pushing back on that right now. Please. You're talking a lot about municipal police right. Great many of us live out in the boonies and for us our local police force is the state police. Yes. I had privilege for ten years in 2005 being represented from Calis on the Central Vermont State Police Community Advisory Board and it's not one of those things where the citizens are trying to control or judge the police. There was a genuine effort of middle sex station commander and I experienced three or four different commanders various levels of interest is there within the municipal things the same outreach to communication and more integration of the police and community? Yes. So it varies from municipality to municipality and I wonder if Chief Fakos wants to bring in about Montpelier but in Burlington we have Police Commission which is seven citizens living in Burlington actually at this point it's six out of seven people of color so it was always very diverse. I mean six out of seven is a fraction of minority representation of Vermont is like unheralded but the point is like what I did when I got to be the chief is I gave them access to all of our civilian complaints is made the police commissioners get to view it inquire about it, ask questions about the disposition they also get access to all of our internal investigations they also get briefs on all of our promotions and our hires. I'm sorry you're going to follow up. Just about dealing with complaints we had some amazing presentations and programs different parts of the state police came and gave us presentations and we were to go to our select boards and continue that. I think that's really important. No and I think it's done ad hoc right so I talked about our transparency with discipline but we also run a citizen police academy and when I say citizen I use that word nominally I use that in the classic sense not like you have to be a citizen and so we run this how many weeks is it John? It's like ten weeks? Eight weeks four hours a night once a week and anybody can enroll and you get a soup to nuts like front to back view of everything the police department does. We run that once here we run another one for youth we also run a bob monthly interfaith clergy and community luncheon where people can come and it's open. There's no agenda that I bring anyone can ask anything that's on their mind but this just it varies from agency to agency. Looking back in my own history I was a hippie back in the 60s I grew up respecting police and then something happened and I think this need to kind of heal that divide When do you think that happened? Like what time frame? This was the late 60s I was in graduate school in Madison, Wisconsin. The tear gas was flying. Sure. For you that was the 60s was the time where there was a cleave where it came apart and because it was was feeling like there were some laws that were unreasonable right and so our method of protesting No I mean listen there's a lot you see the photos of the especially in the south of the police unleashing dogs on protestors right or municipal agencies hitting them with fire hoses like that. The feeling needs to know that. That legacy is there. Sure. Please sir. I think for me there's an elephant in the room here that has to do with the two recent police shootings in the high school by the high school a few months back and then up off home street clearly an emotional problem and all the discussions that I've had with neighbors since is a kind of in my case kind of fear I got stuff while back for a tail-eyed deal and when the cops when the officer came by I rolled down the window and put both my hands on the edge of the window I just don't feel as safe as I did before those two events hurt or hurt and I don't know about having a negotiator I don't know about why the hell they can't get anybody out of the way you know and just take eight hours right there in the mud but to blast away and so many people know the follow-up here on Oak Street that was killed whatever you want to say the elephant for me is a new level of unease within the community and my relationship with the police I've been here 20 years and have never really thought much about it just assumed a kind of almost pal relationship with a policeman I mean that has been not shattered but it has been crumpled up a little bit and when you talk about drop the knife drop the knife does it take to get a negotiator there with a mic or a megaphone and get everybody else out of the way you know I think that I hear what you're saying and I understand I think a lot of people echo your sentiment what's really troubling to me is a lot of the shootings that we see in Vermont by police or against people that turns out they have what looks like a very real gun and it turns out to be a BB gun and I'm not saying police you can't know that when somebody's pointing this thing at you from 10, 20, 30 feet away it takes 10 pounds of pressure 7 pounds of pressure 6 with an index finger to fire a gun and anybody can end the life with that and to say is that a real gun, is that a BB gun are they a good shot, are they not are they really looking to get me or themselves very very when you notice when I wrote that op-ed I wrote about people with knives even the most progressive training in the US about the escalation like ICAP training draws the line at anything that looks like a gun and I think that a lot of the tragedies we've seen in hindsight we go that person was struggling with mental illness and it turns out it was only a BB gun but I don't I don't expect a cop to have X-ray vision and know whether that's a BB gun or not can you ever shoot somebody in the knee so I wish I had a brochure for this because I get asked this like hey how about it you know first of all with both those incidents the individuals the first one, the high school one we were going back to doing our fundamental duty we had a bank robbery, an armed bank robbery and we had a school release for our officer on scene outside the school so multiple priorities are happening we're protecting the school first and foremost then also we identified the bank robber and it was all about containment I was incident commander at that point I was the incident commander at that point I had plenty of resources but what I did not have I did not have a way to effectively communicate so my school resource officer is one of my negotiators he for over an hour with no gloves on with a little heavy ballistic protection is yelling back and forth trying to contain and calm the person as best we could and what I was waiting for was an armored vehicle that I had requested along with the state police tactical services unit because that was the only way we wanted to effectively get close that person safely to have better dialogue we can do that with a robot we can do that with an armored vehicle but if we did something that approached and precipitated an action that was something where time just time and we did the best we could there he was the one that changed the dynamics and all the details are all out there and it was tragic and sometimes and is that a spontaneous suicidal thought in other words that was a bank robbery there was a getaway driver that was later arrested and but it had it once again had a tragic outcome but I didn't have the resources to effectively negotiate I had a negotiator, we did what we could and then the dynamics changed before I got those other resources and the primary resource I was waiting for was an armored vehicle a barricade coming from the Ron State Police Barricade and then as we were trying to take some next steps it just all of a sudden he changed the dynamics with what he did and we had to respond to that the incident that happened here at the roundabout the tragedy we were responding to once again a violent crime in progress the only two officers on responded to somebody if that's labeled as a violent crime in process from all I've heard from conversations and this is I wasn't there I know Zip the tension they've been on duty all night but can you get out of the way you know I'd go over the megaphone and rather than drop the gun, drop the gun, drop the gun bang bang maybe a female voice maybe I respect what you're saying but going back to what Chief Dupose said in the very beginning about rescue and the emergency and how somebody called us because the apartment was being forced to be a gentleman was trying to force his way into an apartment with a knife that was what my two officers were responding to the only two officers on duty then the only other on duty police officers were in Barrie City at that time of day so when they ended up trying to deescalate that was also in the video that the city said they're telling the first of all he's got a gun not a knife anymore when they took opportunities to they said what is your name how can we help you part of our training ideally is to have only one voice whether you're a negotiator or not in someones in crisis just like the analogy with the one police officer saying I have a gun and the rabbis are also why are you doing this someones in crisis we tried to deescalate but we want that one focal point but they did what they could there was traffic we have a full backdrop of all those apartments from the officers perspective or on spring street to also a nursing home and apartments all on the other side and the person at that moment this gun was actually a direct replica of a barretta firearm a 9mm firearm those officers also have an obligation to go home at the end of the day and one of the things we also talked about is below 100 initiative our national goal is going to get below 100 line of duty deaths we're not there yet but my point is and this is also what could be helpful for me as police chief now that you know just a little bit of those circumstances anyway these are very yet you have this fear suddenly you have a different perception of the Montpelier police department our response to the bank robbery was the first time we were ever involved in a deadly force officer involved shooting in the history of the department we've had officers shot shot at but that was the first time that's ever happened before a year and a half later I'm faced with this situation and it's so it's important for me to understand too is how can I help alleviate build that trust I deeply appreciate the range of new facts that I was unaware of in terms of the background and the fact that there are just two guys there and I thank you for your patience and understanding and as I said I can have no way 100 years ago I was in the army for three years I have no sense of what your guys are up against every day if something isn't quite right that's what we don't want like what she was saying we don't want to have that you don't understand what we do or whatever we are in an era of a variety of things happening we don't want to be transparent how we are trained how we choose our police officers when we promote the last time we did a full sergeant's promotion in Montpelier we also brought in people from the community to participate I told the candidates focus on the president's 21st century policing task force report six pillars what does that really mean we told the community what we want to do is again it's a give and take we are your police so when you have these fears I need to to understand better why that fear is because we had two very difficult situations my officers acted admirably we did everything we could and I certainly wish it didn't happen that way gosh do I wish that didn't happen that way but again for you or any member of the community suddenly feel and some of it is normal because we have we basically have a gag order on us on the police while all the other conversations and the misinformation goes out there we are waiting for the Vermont State Police in this case to effect a very thorough investigation give this the Attorney General the opportunity to take that investigation and the state's Attorney what do we have here and to make sure and meanwhile you know you saw Major Trudeau from the Vermont State Police actually on that first press conference that was really hard for me because this is my community this is my department but that was the right face you know we were there later on but my point is that you know we just want to make sure that we have that ability to you know when the question you know is an elephant in the room and it's because this is a really tragically unfortunate situation a situation that occurred in Vermont and in my affiliates specifically but then how do we move on and this is also where where are those resources how do we do a better job making sure when somebody is whether it's addiction you know we you know or mental health issues do we have appropriate resources and you know not this model of crisis intervention teams one of the things they have is 24 hours somebody is in crisis the police are specially trained but you know we have an additional week of training but then they get somebody right to doesn't matter time of day a center that has the psychological support for someone on Piliar we either bring a screener out to us in the field and you know that team 2 model to help somebody in crisis they're only there primarily for safety and secondarily if there's some legal issues like for example if they have to write an emergency warrant for somebody but it's up to the emergency room the emergency department because we don't have we can't just take them to that hospital even though we have a psychological hospital here in Berlin you know so these are all the things that we're all wrangling with so not only do we to anybody any citizen say what are my police doing but also what are the other systems you know years ago substance abuse issues there was a backlog 6 months in Burlington and then but we had no backlog in Montpelier but the public didn't know that so again it's all these things and it's communication and openness to say are we doing everything we can for everybody in our community I just want to say I am so glad I came to this meeting and I am so appreciative of that getting a sense of the scenario and how they unfolded and the bureaucracies beyond your own department what you're up against and I just want to say thank you again that's a great tip we're over time it's such an important topic I know everybody really wants to talk but we are at the end of the library is closed you're all trespassed thank you so much