 And now the League of Women Voters. Thank you for coming. We are very happy that you're here to engage in this important discussion. So I want to introduce to you our moderator, who we are very lucky because she has essentially dedicated her career to fighting discrimination. As an attorney, she was the AG's head of the Civil Rights Division. She's been the chair of the Human Rights Commission. And she was a Justice of the Vermont Supreme Court for 21 years and continued working on many ways to increase access to justice. So please welcome retired Justice Janice Johnson. Thank you, Anna. Good evening, everyone. I'm very happy to be here tonight but talking about a really difficult subject. One of the most intractable problems in the criminal justice system here in Vermont and across the country is the negative influence of race. Race influences decision making from arrest to charging to sentencing. Racial bias taints how juries look at witnesses and how they make decisions. Race influences which groups will be subject to surveillance and arrest. On every occasion that an actor in the justice system can exercise discretion and there are many such occasions, there's an opportunity for racial bias to affect the results. Is this because everybody's a racist and intentionally wants to discriminate against people? No. I think if you talk to anybody in the system, most people believe they and are convinced that they are acting completely fairly and they're just trying to carry out justice in an even-handed manner and they're treating everyone the same. After all, fair and equal treatment is highly valued in American culture. It's the first principle our kids learn when they throw it back at us. It's not fair. You're treating me differently from somebody else. And as long as we feel like we're being even-handed in our application of justice, then our system should be one of equality. But it's not. If we just look at the tail end of a criminal case, Vermont incarceration rates so that African-Americans are incarcerated at a rate that is eight and a half times that of whites. And that's slightly down from a ratio of 10 to one of a few years ago. I mean, Vermont is clearly an outlier with about four other states. Nationwide, the ratio is still five to six times. So tonight we're gonna be looking at other statistics that show how disparities in policing can funnel more people of color into the criminal justice system than whites. Whether we frame this problem as structural racism or systemic racism or implicit bias, our value of equal treatment rings hollow because it's encompassed by a system in which public policies, institutional practices, cultural representations, and other norms work in various reinforcing and interdependent ways to perpetuate racial group inequity. It's not something that a few people practice. It's a feature of the social, economic, and political systems in which we live. It's so ubiquitous that we don't even see it because it doesn't take any particular action on our part for it to operate. So speaking as a white person, I carry that advantage with me every day, every moment of my life, while non-whites carry a disadvantage. Think of it this way. In the US, everyone can race for the same prizes, but one group has a tailwind and the other a headwind. So who's gonna win? Although racism is pervasive across our culture, tonight we're just gonna focus on criminal justice. We're gonna hear from three speakers who all have a different vantage point on that system. The first is Jessica Brown on the far left here. Ms. Brown has been a public defender for more than 20 years in both the state and federal systems here in Vermont and in New Hampshire. Since 2016, she's been the supervising attorney in the Chittenden County Public Defender's Office. She also serves on the attorney general's panel on racial disparities in the criminal and juvenile justice system. And she's actively involved in developing restorative justice programs, treatment models, and other progressive approaches to addressing criminal justice. Our second speaker in the middle is a professor of economics from UVM, Stephanie Seguino. Her research focuses on inequality by race and gender in pay, employment, health, and housing. Relevant to our topic this evening, Professor Seguino has published a study entitled Driving While Black and Brown in Vermont. She obtained her PhD from American University. She has served as an economist in Haiti and has consulted internationally with the UN, the World Bank, and USAID. She's a former member of the Burlington School Board, where she advocated for eliminating the achievement gap in schools as well as racial and socioeconomic disparities and suspensions. Finally, we will hear from Captain Gary Scott of Vermont State Police, where he has been employed for over 19 years. He is the director of fair and impartial policing and community affairs, which oversees all initiatives for fair and impartial policing. Captain Scott previously commanded the Williston Barracks, the crash reconstruction team, and served as traffic safety commander. He also serves on the AG's panel on racial disparities in the criminal and juvenile justice system. So I welcome all of our speakers to our panel this evening, and we will turn first to Jessica Brown. Is this on? Yes, great. Thanks for the introduction. Thanks for having all of us. I really appreciate that so many people are interested in discussing these issues. As noted, Gary and I are both on the racial disparities advisory panel. Another member of that panel is also here, Rebecca Turner, who also happens to be a public defender. And I'm gonna get the conversation started by kind of expanding actually on a little bit of what Justice Johnson talked about in terms of giving you an overview of the criminal and juvenile justice systems. And I would say the framework that the advisory panel used to kind of organize our thoughts that went into the report that we submitted to the legislature and our thoughts that informed the recommendations that we made. We viewed the criminal and juvenile justice systems as having sort of three parts, just basically a beginning, middle, and end. And the report that we've submitted so far really only addresses the beginning stages. But what we tried to focus on or identify in each of those stages of a case are what we refer to as high impact, high discretion decision points. So these are the points in a criminal, adult criminal case or a juvenile case in which a person in authority gets to make a decision about what's gonna happen in that case. So examples at the beginning are pretty much everything that happens before a case even gets to court. Usually that's gonna start with some sort of interaction with law enforcement. It might be a police officer being called to an incident. It might be a police officer making a traffic stop. In a school setting it might be a school resource officer responding to an incident. That's the very first person who gets to decide things like do I think a crime is being committed? Am I going to make an arrest? Even police officers statewide, there are I think increasingly programs being offered by community justice centers such as diversion, alternatives to prosecuting criminal conduct for adults and youth. So often a police officer gets to make that decision. Am I going to, okay, maybe I do think that there's evidence that a crime was committed here or delinquent act. Am I going to arrest this person or am I gonna refer this person to a community justice center to try to repair the harm, maybe go through a restorative process? In a traffic stop situation, the officer is going to get to decide whether to expand, maybe someone gets pulled over because the headlights out. The officer then has the discretion to expand that stop to ask the person if they can search their vehicle. Stephanie is certainly gonna talk a lot more about that but on what are they, are officers making decisions about who they're asking to search? So that's everything that, those are just some really basic examples of things that can happen before Casey even gets to court. So let's say an adult or a youth is actually either, well, one more decision that can happen before Casey even gets to court. If an officer does decide to arrest someone, do they give them a citation to show up to court on their own or do they decide to hold them in custody? Same with a youth. Are they sent home to a parent or guardian or are they held in custody in the juvenile detention center? All of these, again, are points where decisions are being made entirely based on someone's, well, largely influenced on someone's discretion, right? There are certainly circumstances in the criminal and juvenile justice systems in which certain outcomes are mandatory. We are, I'm talking about the state system, so unlike the federal system, we do not have what I would refer to as sentencing guidelines, so to speak, but every offense has a sentence attached to it and there are certainly certain crimes that have mandatory minimum sentences upon conviction. So that would be an example of a mandatory situation, but there is a lot of discretion in the criminal and juvenile justice systems. So, moving forward, someone's arrested. The case is filed in court. It's not, the officer decides to send the case to the state's attorney's office. Then the prosecutor gets to start making decisions based on their discretion, right? Again, a prosecutor could decide, yes, I see evidence of a crime here, but I think that this harm can be repaired through a community justice center, through a diversion program, or nope, I think this case needs to be prosecuted, so we're gonna put this case before the judge, who then gets to start making decisions again about whether someone maybe has continued to be held in custody, who gets released, who has cash bail, who has conditions of release that maybe they can't comply with and so they can't get out of jail. Other sort of, other stages of a case that I would consider part of the middle part, when, once we're in court, is what kind of sentencing offers do people get? Justice Johnson talked about real disparities in who is sentenced to real disparities just based on race, between who is sentenced to serve significant amounts of time in jail and who is not. So what kinds of plea offers are prosecutors giving? Who gets to go to treatment courts? Again, alternatives to incarceration, jury selection. I was just thinking on the way here about trial. If I'm being frank, when I am representing a person of color in a trial and picking a jury, it mostly looks like this audience and there's me and my client, right? And I think we have, correct me if I'm wrong, but I am aware of one judge who was not white in the state of Vermont. So I would say bail, pretrial services, plea offers, treatment courts, jury selection, trial, those are all sort of part of the middle stage and then the end stage is, if someone's convicted of a crime, again, what are the disparities in how we're sentencing people? What does community supervision look like? Are there disparities in who's being placed on community supervision and who is not? Again, who is getting sentenced to jail? What re-entry is like for people of different races trying to return to the community after serving periods of incarceration and then sort of who's getting violated while they're on probation or parole or furlough and being sent back to jail? And so in the middle stages, a lot of the discretion lies with the prosecutors and the judges. In the end stages, again, a lot of the discretion lies with the judges, but certainly once someone's in the custody of the Department of Corrections, a lot of the discretion lies within that agency and on community supervision that involves probation officers largely. So that's kind of an overview of the different stages of criminal and I, there are parallels at every stage in the juvenile system. I kind of mentioned at the outset, like school resource officers are police officers that are staged in schools to intervene and would be the person at, and certainly other school authorities, but some of the people making discretionary decisions about who's getting charged or how to handle incidents at schools. And then there are similar stages that parallel things I've talked about in the criminal system in the juvenile system, just essentially with different names, different terminology in juvenile court, but the same process, right? Deciding whether a youth is gonna go home or go into custody somewhere. Deciding what sort of alternatives we might offer or try with a youth as opposed to just prosecuting them for what's considered what might be delinquent conduct and then sort of how we supervise them in the community if they do stay court involved. Gary and I kind of did a preliminary version of this talk on the radio last week and one of the things that the host asked me was, well, can you give some examples of where you see disparity showing up in your work with your clients or what do your clients say happens and that sort of thing. And I would say that the two basic examples that I give, one from the criminal system and one from the juvenile system. And I will preface this by saying, Stephanie's gonna talk a lot about statistics or data and certainly in the advisory panel's recommendations we spent a lot of time talking about collecting data and data is really important. But I really can only speak from a position of what I feel like I observe and sort of how it seems. I can really only speak anecdotally. I can't say that my agency sees this percentage of black clients being held pretrial versus this percentage of white clients. But I can say that I certainly feel like when I am representing sort of let's say a native Vermonter who is white, who is appearing in front of a judge who is a white native Vermonter and that judge can say to my client, oh, I know where you live in St. Alden's. I lived over on that street. I'm gonna let you out today. Try to get a job and we'll see you back here or whatever. It's very different than when I'm standing with a similar aged young black male client who probably is not a native Vermonter, who I feel like the judge sort of automatically, that same judge sort of automatically looks at from just criminal, it is easier for that judge to criminalize that client than it is for him to relate to that client the way he might have with my white client who's also from Franklin County. You know, so that's how it feels to represent clients of color in Vermont. I would say the way for a few years I was doing a lot of DuVille cases in family division in Chittenden County. There is a large new American population in Chittenden County and I definitely noticed what I thought was a trend of young black youth who maybe got into some sort of trouble at school or in their community who's parents maybe were not proficient in English, had limited English proficiency. And it really seemed like it was easier for law enforcement to have those kids go through the court system than to otherwise engage with the family the same way they might had they been a white English speaking family who maybe would get to go to a community justice center instead of going through the court system or who maybe their kid wouldn't get cited at all. Maybe the officer would just bring the kid home and say, hey, your kid did this today. It can't happen again, you know, and everybody could move on. So again, that's not statistical or data based information. That's anecdotal, but that's definitely how it feels to represent clients of color in Vermont. So I'm gonna leave it at that for now and pass the mic to Stephanie. Turn off the mic. Thank you all for being here and for talking about such an important topic. And thank you, Justice Johnson, for your introductory remarks, which really situate the situation that we're in. I wanna also say a few words to Jessica that anecdotal information is deeply valuable. Data analysis that I do paints a picture of patterns, but we also need to humanize these data with stories. And so the stories that you told really resonate for people. And I think really evolve what the challenges are, but I'm gonna talk about the data. So let's see what I'm doing here. Oops, go back, go back, go back. There we go. So as Justice Johnson said, the issue of racial disparities in the criminal justice system is pervasive. And this book by Michelle Alexander really identifies the problem in terms of what she calls the new Jim Crow, the new system of segregation, if you will, that's enforced through the criminal justice system with people of color and particular men of color segregated through incarceration. And one of the questions we could ask ourselves is Vermont different? And certainly, Vermonters think that we are different here in terms of racial bias, but as Justice Johnson noted, even here in Vermont, we see racial disparities in mass incarceration. And so we see, for example, that of all of those who are imprisoned in Vermont, 11% are African-Americans, even though African-Americans are roughly 2% of Vermont's population. So they're over-incarcerated by a degree of roughly 500%. And so one of the questions is, how does this happen? And as Jessica noted, there are various stages in the criminal justice system, the first stage being interaction with the police, the next with prosecutors, judges, and so on and so forth. And so an interesting question is, and at each stage, I would submit that the processes and the practices that lead to racial disparities differ slightly. We need to understand each stage separately. And so one of the things that Nancy, my colleague Nancy Works and I, who have worked on this data, wanted to do was to look at Vermont data with regard to racial disparities in policing. This work actually started about 10 years ago in Burlington where the community of color, and in particular Hal Colston, had written a letter to the editor talking about driving law black, an incident of being stopped by a police officer when he was with his son for no apparent reason. And that led to a conversation with the police chief at that time, Tom Trombley, in which they agreed to meet for coffee. And I think it's important to also recognize the details of this Tom Trombley when he called Hal Colston said, why didn't you come to me first? Why did you go to the newspaper? And Hal said, because I don't trust the police. And I think that that is one of the issues around racial disparities is it leads to mistrust between the community and the police, which is fundamentally important for public safety. And we really, it's really important for us to solve this problem for moral reasons, for justice reasons, but also in terms of public safety. So in any case, they met and a group was formed called Uncommon Alliance, which was the area of police chiefs and Vermont State Police participated at that time as well. They agreed to, they heard stories, they heard these anecdotes, but anecdotes don't, it's easy to dismiss anecdotes as being a special case. And so it was agreed upon that they would collect race data in policing. They did it voluntarily. Vermont was one of the few states that did not require it. And so it was a real tribute to these police chiefs that they agreed to collect the data voluntarily. The data emerged and showed racial disparities. And in 2014, the legislature passed a law requiring all law enforcement to collect race data. And this is the data that Nancy and I analyzed. And one of the things that's important to understand about an analysis like this is that you're not looking for a smoking gun, which is truly the wrong metaphor in this particular conversation, but I don't know, another one. You're not looking for a single piece of evidence that's gonna prove your case. What you're looking for is a pattern of behavior. Are these disparities consistent across towns? Are they racially consistent over time? And so on and so forth. And so we picked several indicators to see whether there are racial disparities, whether in racial shares of stocks, for example. So in Burlington, blacks are roughly 6% of the population. We would expect them to be roughly 6% of drivers stopped and so on and so forth. We also looked at tickets versus warnings where people of color are more likely to get tickets versus warnings. Are they more likely to be arrested than white drivers? Were they more likely to be searched? And were they more likely to have contraband or less likely to have contraband? So I'm gonna very quickly go through these results with you to show you what we found in this analysis. It was roughly a half a million traffic stops that we had over a several year period. And I'm not gonna talk to you about all of the indicators but a few that I think are important. So one that we found was that black drivers are arrested at roughly twice the rate of white drivers. And so one of the reasons for that might be that if somebody is stopped for a particular reason, the officer has to make a decision about whether this person is a flight risk or not. Well, mistrust in negative stereotypes about people of color lead to often white people in particular becoming much more distrustful of people of color. And so you can imagine that some scenarios, people of color are arrested while a person, a white person might be simply given the citation, especially in the scenario that Jessica describes in which the particularly white officer might see someone from a town that they are from or somebody that they know that they have a familiarity and therefore a sense of trust. But nevertheless, that trust bias is one of the factors that may lead to these arrest disparities. It may be for legitimate reasons as well. We don't know, but this is one of the data points that we have. We also found that black drivers were four times more likely to be searched than white drivers and Hispanic drivers were three times more likely to be searched than white drivers. And I wanna just say that for any of you I have never been searched, I've been stopped plenty of times by the police, but I haven't been searched but I receive phone calls from people, especially people of color who have been stopped and searched. And they talk to me about how humiliating this process is, that it takes hours, that they are extremely fearful. So I don't think we should dismiss this, I think we should take very seriously these disparities and these extensive disparities. And so these are the search rates for various racial groups across the state. And one of the things that we see is that Asians typically actually are treated more favorably by the police than whites and certainly by other people, other groups of color. And part of that has to do with our racial history, our racial stereotypes. We tend to think of Asians as the model, minority, and sometimes we even call them honorary whites. And I remember I'll give you an example of this later on. And so when the police search a vehicle they typically are looking for contraband. Contraband can be of many different kinds. It can be a 16 year old with a pack of cigarettes. It can be somebody with stolen goods. It can be drugs of some kind and so on and so forth. And so the severity of contraband differs. And we didn't have data on what the contraband was. But we didn't know what the outcome of the search was. So we ignored those cases in which there was only a warning because those were relatively minor cases and there are a lot of negative stereotypes about people of color that often trigger searches that are typically around issues of drugs in particular. And so what we found is that although blacks and Hispanics are more likely to be searched than white drivers, they're actually less likely to be found with contraband. And so in the way that people like myself, i.e. economists think, it follows that police departments have limited resources. These searches take hours. It takes an enormous amount of time. If officers are finding that they are less likely to find contraband on black drivers, we would expect that they would revise their threshold and evidence and say, you know, just because that person looked nervous was not a sufficient reason. Or whatever the other factors that might be that trigger a search, for example. And the fact that they're not doing so suggests some kind of implicit bias that is influencing their decision making around this. And so the difference between search rates and contraband hit rates is often where we identify not just racial disparities, but actual bias on the part of police officers. And so these are the agencies that we have the data on. We had a number of other agencies but the sample sizes were too small to be able to report on. So I'm not picking on these guys. And I just want to note, especially because Gary's here, that Vermont State Police had fairly high search rates of blacks relative to whites, but their disparities have come down in the last couple of years. So these are data from roughly 2012 to 2014. I think it's instructive for us that living in Vermont to compare outcomes in Vermont with the rest of the country. And so we did some digging, my colleague and I, looking at search rate studies across the country. And so on the far left, you have North Carolina State. Blacks are 50% more likely to be searched than white drivers by the Fayetteville, North Carolina Police, 60% more likely, 1.6. Winooski is fairly low, but you can see other places where we tend to think that racism might be more accentuated than it is here. We actually find that their search rate, the ratio of the black search rate to the white search rate is actually lower than in a number of agencies in Vermont. There's a lot of difficulties, there are a lot of challenges around data analysis, but this pattern is very consistent across the data. And although data are imperfect, and we always have measurement problems, the disparities are so wide, the disparity of in so growing to the black drivers being 6.8 times more likely to be searched than a white driver is so large that even with difficulties and errors in the data, we are pretty certain that that large disparity exists. One of the things we also looked at was differences in stock rates and our stock racial shares of stocks. I show this last because this is one of the indicators we have that is less certain because of the data. So we basically ranked all of the agencies in our study from the highest share of black drivers relative to all drivers stopped. So in Vergev, for example, black drivers were, let me see, okay, black share of stocks, okay. I'm having a brain thing here going on. Okay, I'm gonna ignore the left axis and I'm just gonna tell you what this graph tells you. So this red bar indicates the black share of the driving population. It's different in every county, but we normalize this so that you would expect that the black share of drivers of every town would be pretty close to this red bar. So the issue around, I'm gonna take a moment to explain this because it's often a point of contention and debate. It's not easy to measure the driving population. There's nobody standing out on the street corner to measure the driving population. We could use the census data, but not everybody drives so the census is not perfect, but we can use accident data. And so in Vermont, officers when they go to an accident will identify who is the not a fault driver and the race of that driver. That's a pretty good estimate of racial shares of the driving population. And so that's what these data here represent is basically based on Department of Motor Vehicle accident data. And so what you see over here with Virginia is that the share of black drivers that are stopped by the police is much larger than the share of the driving population. And what I mean by a pattern is the following that it's true for almost all agencies in Vermont. And let's see if I have, I don't have Asians here. If I were to show you Asians, it would be the exact opposite. This red bar would be up here and most agencies would be under stopping Asian drivers relative to white drivers. And that's what I get when I mean by a pattern. The pattern is so consistent that it is always black drivers and to a lesser extent Hispanic drivers who are treated less favorably than white drivers in every city in town and virtually every study that I've looked at and that's been done in the United States. And so especially with the search data, I often talk to police officers, I've done numerous ride-alongs with police officers and I ask them about why these disparities in search rates. And what they tell me often is that because they believe it's black and brown drivers bringing in drugs from understeen. And so there is this perception that black and brown drivers are the drug traffickers and this is what triggers the suspicion that leads to a search. So a couple of years ago, a year and a half ago or so, I talked to Captain Scott about possibly looking at Vermont State Police data for 2016 to see who was bringing in the drugs in the contraband that was found in searches. And what was found at least in that year for the Vermont State Police, that all of the searches in which heroin, cocaine and opioids were found were found on white drivers. There were no drivers of color found with these serious drugs. I think this is something that we really need to deeply investigate further. It may be that there are racial aspects to drug trafficking but randomly stopping vehicles on the road may not be the most effective way to address that problem. And so I think it's something that we should look at much more closely broadly in the state. And so, whoops, sorry. And so I wanna just talk to you a little bit about what is leading this. Since I've done this work, I've really come delved into a lot of the research around implicit bias and psychology and stereotypes and so on and so forth. And what I'm gonna suggest to you is that a lot of the disparities that we are seeing are not due to intentional bias but due to racial stereotypes and particularly negative stereotypes of people of color that lead to implicit bias. So we can think of a stereotype as a generalization about a group of people. It's a fixed belief about a group of people. And so, for example, I could look at Gary and I would have a stereotype about a police officer and I would make all kinds of assumptions about police, that I have about police officers and assume those about Gary. Not therefore taking the time to understand who he is as an individual or a person but simply making judgments based on his membership in a particular group. And that's what we find with regard to race in this country in particular that there has been a long history of the cultivation of negative stereotypes about black and brown men, that they are a threat, that they're criminal, that they're dangerous. And much of this has its origin in slavery. Many of you may know that the Ku Klux Klan originally started as a slave patrol, for example. And in the 1800s, scientific racism was cultivated as a way to justify the racial hierarchy that lived in the country with people of color and particular African-Americans as defined as more less intellectual, more criminal, so on and so forth. And of course these stereotypes change over time but the more recent stereotype that we have particularly associated with black and brown men is that drug traffickers started with the war on drugs in the 1980s. And so this leads to this implicit bias in which we define people first, we categorize them into a group, and then we see who they are. In many ways it makes who they are invisible because we have this stereotypical lens in front of us. And I've always been intrigued by this from Hurricane Katrina in which you have white folks that were finding, I think, is that what it says here, that they were finding goods and services as compared to black people looting. And so this is really, I think, one of the challenges that we face with regard to the criminal justice system but in particular policing in Vermont. And as has been mentioned, this isn't unique to the policing and isn't unique to the criminal justice system. We find this also in our school systems. We find it in all of our systems. So these are data from Burlington on suspensions by Riggs. And as you can see, 11% of black students were suspended in 2013, 2014 compared to 3.8 to 4.2% of white students. I could tell you stories that would raise the hair on your neck about the differential treatment of students of color in Burlington schools, not only in suspensions, but in a variety of other ways, academically and so on and so forth. And so one of the things that we did in Burlington on the school board was we requested that the school district end out of school suspensions and that they adopt restorative practices. And because so many of our kids have trauma as new Americans, that the schools invest in trauma training as a way to reduce these disparities. And I've been off the school board now for a year and a half, but my last meeting at the school board, it looked like actually the racial disparity and suspensions at Burlington High School had been narrowed substantially if not eliminated. So I want to just give you the sense that we can make change. Change can happen, but we have to honestly acknowledge the disparities that exist and then take the steps to change those. I wanted to just end this by just kind of moving a bit beyond the policing system and just talk to you a little bit about what I know about racial disparities and sentencing. Not all disparities are discrimination. There may be differences in group behaviors that lead to these disparities that are justifiable. And so one of the things that we do as economists and statisticians in general is that we try to control for all of the legally relevant factors that might explain these disparities. So for example, in the group, young people are more likely to commit crimes than older people, so you might want to control for people's age, for example. Men for whatever reason are more likely to engage in criminal behavior than women. Again, you might want to control for gender and so on and so forth. And in these studies, what has happened is that we have found that this is a study by the U.S. Sentencing Commission is that controlling for all of the other factors, similarly situated white and black men, black men receive roughly 20% longer sentences than white men. Mark Bennett, who is a judge in Iowa, further found, and this has been found in other studies, that it's not only your perceived race, but it's actually how dark your skin is. And the darker your skin, the more likely you are to get a longer sentence than other groups. So I want to end this on a relatively hopeful note. We are still working hard on this issue in terms of using data. And I think that is an important, important step that we are finally having evidence-based mechanism to add substance to the anecdotes that we experience every day. But I will say that the resistance in Vermont in particular in a variety of institutions is very real and it's really going to be important for citizens to speak up, to hold their select boards accountable, their city councils accountable, and ultimately their police departments accountable for these data. Thank you. I'm going to stand also. Tough stuff. Well, thank you for having me, I really appreciate it. Give you a little overview of the Vermont State Police. We, as Stephanie said, we consider Stephanie a partner with us. And we look at the data that she's brought to us and we've worked very hard to try to do a lot with that and I think if you can go to our webpage and see that we publicly post our data every year in June, it's legislatively mandated to be up by September so you can see the changes and the progress. It's not perfect yet, there's still work to be done. But so the Vermont State Police is the primary police agency for the state of Vermont. We cover about 80% of the land mass, about 50% of the population. Every community that doesn't have a police department, we are the primary police agency. We have 10 barracks throughout the state, three divisions. We have the uniform division, detective division and the support services division that's hiring, recruiting. So one of the big things is exactly what Jessica and Stephanie have both talked about is hearing from our communities. And that's really, the data is just like, I think I've heard Stephanie say this before, it's sort of the blood pressure of the organization. The data is one part of it, but you really have to know what your community wants and where they wanna go and what they feel. And those lived experiences is really what drives our agency and what we're doing. We're the only state police agency in the country that has this title, director of fair and impartial policing. It's at a command level position. My office is between the colonel of the state police and the other majors. And I have influence over everything that we do from hiring to how we offer people when they're leaving and their experiences. So that's where I'm gonna sort of go with what we're doing and looking at all of this and where we're going with all this. So we talk about recruiting and that's a big question in Vermont is how do we get young people to stay in Vermont? We're an aging population, we are losing young people. We're trying, we have the resources as a police agency that send our recruiters out of the state. We have sent our recruiters up and down the East Coast to predominantly black universities trying to get people to come to Vermont. They hear about the weather, they don't wanna come. So it's a challenge, it's a struggle, it's real. A lot of people just, we tend to get people in the door. It's very white and they don't tend to stay and they make it about two years before we lose them. So that's an issue that we continue to look at statewide and not just within the state police. How do we keep people from out of state to stay here and wanna stay here? Especially if they're of color and outside of the, see what is their lived experience. So that's a challenge that we continue to look to improve and work upon and how we can do a better job. Our test across the state for getting into law enforcement, we're seeing about a 50% fail rate of people of color. And we don't have a reason why. We have people that have master's degrees, advanced degrees, not passing the test of color in. So we've sent the statewide test to bid to see why and have a research project done on that on why that's occurring. So that's still up there, but that's something as the agency that we've been pushing for quite some time to figure out what is the issues that we're seeing there. Especially new Americans that are taking the test or having difficulty understanding the test. So it's a part of how we have to change the language, but there's been resistance from other law enforcement agencies around the state. It's one general test to get into the police cabin and everyone goes to the same police cabin basically. For the state police, and that's all I'm speaking about specifically, is when we get someone that passed the test and now they're coming in for an oral board, we, as they're waiting outside to meet with three commanders that take their oral board questions, we hand them a piece of paper that says, what will you bring in way of cultural diversity to the Vermont State Police? So our normal applicant is a 20-something Norwich graduate. So that can be a challenging question to them and they try to figure out ways and that's another way where we're trying to send messaging to this applicant of what our values are as an agency. When they come into the oral board, there are scenario-based questions related to LGBT issues, related to a lone African male in a parking lot late at night and a store clerk is calling you there, how are you gonna handle that situation? And we start to get a sense of this applicant of who they are and they're gonna meet the values that we want as a law enforcement officer. If they make it through the hiring process, through that stage and go to a background investigation, we do a large, very deep dive into their social media presence and who they are in their community and making sure, again, that they have the values and the people that they've lived their life with are representing the values that we want as a state trooper in the state. If they are then hired, we have a process where we have an applicant for three weeks before they go to the 16-week Academy and then after 16 weeks, they go to another eight weeks back with the State Police. So three weeks with the State Police, 16 weeks at the Law Enforcement Academy where everyone goes to, then eight weeks back with the State Police. In the early first three weeks, the Chair of the Racial Disparities Panel, Dr. Aiton Nasred Nalongo and I do training with our new recruits. And this is a very introductory, if you're not familiar, we have a pretty rigid military style, paramilitary style process. So they're eating squared off and they're doing all that stuff. So it's a difficult time to learn, but we're starting, again, to chip away at that applicant and that recruit to make sure they understand the values of our agency. We start to have difficult conversations about implicit bias, racial tones, a new American, Black Lives Matter, what do these mean, and all these types of things and get the recruit to talk about those things. They go through the 16-week Academy, there's a mandatory one-day block of training that they take in addition to what is led into the overall curriculum of motor vehicle law, criminal law, everything else in there, the scenarios that they do, they have bits and pieces of where we can put implicit bias in there. After they graduate the Academy, we have them for a full day. Again, myself and Curtis Reed, who's from Southern Vermont, where they watch the documentary, the 13th, they take the Harvard implicit bias exam and there's a bunch of reading material that is also given to them. So this is all before they are even gonna be released to their barracks where they're gonna meet with a field training officer. We have a fair and partial policing policy, we have a victim services policy, which relate also to immigration status and how we deal with migrant farm workers and we also have interpretive policies. So they have to sign off on all these and understand the policies again before they will be released to work by themselves as a state trooper. So that's all the way within that first year of what we've done with this applicant to try to set the tone of who we are as an agency and what we expect from them. When it comes to training, we looked at this, it started in 2006 for us, where the colonel at the time was James Baker, now the charge of corrections. Went and met with Curtis Reed about a survey that had come out at the time about people of color saying they were being targeted by the police and this was disturbing and we started this path where we created a fair and partial policing committee which has helped, this is made up of community members who meet four times a year and they have set the direction of all things that is talked about recruiting lies in. We've taken the impact from our community and what they wanted and implemented into our program probably on board people. The training that we now have for all of our members started at the top, right? So the culture will always eat the policy, no matter what. So we needed to make sure all of our senior leaders have now gone through some type of implicit bias training we brought out outside national experts, Dr. Laurie Ferdell from the University of Florida did a training for all of our senior commanders and then we designed programs also so our new people are getting all trained, all of our senior commanders are getting trained so where do we wanna get? It's the middle group, the informal peer leaders and supervisors of the next challenge that we're at. So within the last two years we've had every single supervisor in the state has gone through implicit bias training, multiple times of e-learning trainings, in-person trainings and at their barracks training. So this is ongoing, all the time processes that's occurring with them. So we're trying to get in every which way we can. We've also started an informal leaders program within the state police, which we have about 35 members who are people who wanna evolve this process, look at it and wanna get more information and then we look at it as a time where in the troop room with a having lunch together they could have these difficult conversations about what's happening nationally and this informal leaders are sort of an alternative view of what we are, the confirmation buyers many of us always sort of frequently go to when we look at media all this and have these conversations at the lunch table in a relaxed environment and start to get our troopers to think about alternative views of what is happening nationally. So that is sort of the training element and there's more and there's other trainings that are being developed. Supervision and accountability, every motor vehicle stop that Vermont State Trooper makes there's a camera system in the car. We've been trying to purchase spotty cameras it's another one of my projects for several years that's a financial problem that we're running into a back end infrastructure but every car stop has a video to it so we can see every single car stop and we can review them. We have a real time web-based employee evaluation system so there's a certain amount of complaints of use of force made against our trooper if there's three in a certain amount of period of time it flags their supervisor and the supervisor's response and that automatically kicks in a review of that trooper's performance on all those collectively it uses a force or pursuits or complaints and seeing if there's an underlined theme in what type of training we need to be brought back in to start looking at. We have a complaint process so if you go to our webpage you'll be able to see it right off the start and you can file a complaint against a trooper on the webpage, through our Facebook page, through call-ins, through dispatch, through email, to walk-ins, to any which way so we wanted to make sure that was put out there it's in Spanish and French we've had it translated so people can see that and pick it up and realize how to make a complaint along with all of our policies that are on the page where my information sits for our fair and impartial policing policy our interpreter services and victim services so trying to get that out there as much as we can. We have accountability panels where every commander of every division has to have a strategic plan and one of the pillars is how they look at fair and impartial policing and what they can do in their particular unit and at the end of the year they have to come to headquarters in front of senior commanders and present on either they have succeeded or not succeeded in that plan and then what resources we as a commander provide them to help them succeed and that can be difficult for some units computer crimes units, detecting divisions and they have to get creative to think about what techniques and every unit has really grabbed onto that and try and figure out ways in which they can do it better. And also for our internal affairs process we have citizens, it's called the state police advisory committee that reviews all internal affairs complaints and that's made up of citizens that are appointed by the governor and that's legislative and mandate. Outreach to diverse communities that's one of the things I have tackled as part of being in this job is some success stories with that. I was in the Williston Barracks in Burlington area so the new American, so a young 11 year old boy drowned up in the Moosey River a few years ago. Prior to that, as the station commander at the Williston Barracks, I had done outreach with the associations of Africans living in Vermont so I really made those connections going into it. So there was translator issues right from the get go the young boys in the water, the young his friends were not looking for them and they're trying to figure out the language barriers. As I was called in within the next couple of hours I became a recovery mission. I had already made that connection with there with the associations of Africans living in Vermont and we were able to kind of bring that situation down by explaining to the family through proper interpreters of what was gonna happen next and how this process was gonna work. And ultimately even though our tragedy was there we had a good developmental process of how we could do things and how we can do the better. And it's been unfortunately several other drownings up in the Chittenden County area but now recognizing the informal leader or the tribal leader in there having the detective make the outreach to that person first and they go together to notify the family is a cultural difference that we normally wouldn't do in law enforcement we're usually only speaking to the family first because that's the next of kin and I'll recognize these cultural differences of the detectives after seeing it be successful are all on board with it. So now I get these phone calls like hey this is what we get going on and it's working better and better. So we have an extensive list of groups that I do a lot of outreach with. Pride Center is a big one. We go to the Pride Festival each year in September. NAACP down at Rutland Town with more. So we've made a lot of outreach in those communities and making sure they're part of the process of how we're doing the work that we're doing. The traffic stop data is something we continue to look at and push out and make sure we're continually cleaning. Stephanie and I have frequent conversations about traffic stop data and how we can do it better where are the issues and the things that we have learned there's been a lot, you know we pushed all this out, sorry, capturing we didn't train people how to take it all in. So there's errors in there we've gone through and right chunk in makes these problems and so but it doesn't, as she mentioned the themes are still there. So you got to acknowledge that the themes there even though you know there's certain errors in there that you need to look at and that's the message that we, our members we look at all the time is that is still there because we're hearing it from our community and now it's been proven without it even though there's minor errors in there that we have to take a look at and fix. We continue to do that and that's something we want to partner with to make sure we can do it better. So that's something we strive to do all the time. And the last thing is just sort of the policies and institutional practices. We looked at it as this work will never be done for the state police. We're fully engaged in doing it. We continue to try to find other people within the agencies, look to other places around the country that are doing the work and what can we steal from them and put it into practice here in Vermont. So that's sort of the quick overview I think is a half hour question so that's pretty much what we're doing so far. Before we open it up for audience questions I just wanted to ask a question for anybody on the panel, maybe all of you. We've talked a lot about data tonight and I'm wondering if you think there is more data that we need to collect. I mean, I think it sounds like the problem is proved but and also I've heard that the legislature is interested in collecting more data. I'm wondering if that's a way to shelve the problem not deal with remedies or if there really is data that we need to collect and should be pursuing that and to make it mandatory. So I know you, Professor Sequinoe, have had trouble with the data that has been collected and I think Captain Scott referred to that also as things not quite collected correctly. So what do you think about more data? I mean I think there's additional data that we can collect. For example around contraband you can use the data to test hypotheses or to test people's assumptions and so forth. So I think we could do that. I actually don't think that's where the data problem lies. It lies primarily in other segments of the criminal justice system. So for example, if you're trying to look at racial disparities in sentencing in Vermont the data are simply not there and state's attorneys don't have that data either. I mean you know these issues better than I do but every time I talk to a state's attorney it really is just not enough data to identify where the problems are in the criminal justice system and to influence decisions. So I actually think that and also on use of force is where data is needed. The traffic stop data, we sort of have it, we need a few more things but the entire system right now is broken in terms of getting the data and helping law enforcement use the data but that's a slightly different issue, organizational issue. Yeah but one point that I just wanna emphasize is that it's important what you showed about the stops and the results of the stops because those myths, racial myths are driving behaviors and those behaviors are resulting in discriminatory actions. So on the one hand they're really important because all of these racial myths we have drive policy and that's part of the problem. So Captain Scott do you wanna say anything about data collection? Yeah I think use of force is on the horizon at least for us, we released it in the past we're trying to do it in a way that it's much like we have it up now, we're gonna on our webpage so people will be able to come and sort of see a dashboard of how it's used and what's going on with all that. So it's difficult because I use the force from there's no standard of practice of what that means nationally or even in the state. So that is where we're trying to really narrow it down but we will stand by, we should have something up on our webpage within a year I'm saying or even shorter that will show that. But I think, I agree with Stanley that these points throughout the system where it's easy to point to the start of the system with law enforcement and others don't really recognize it and so law enforcement has taken a beating for the last couple years on that. So it would be nice to see some of the others get involved. Yeah, well I think there was a study years ago because we've trained judges on it that showed that African Americans got longer sentences than similarly situated white people. So that and that was done by the Bureau of Crime Statistics wasn't it Anna? Yeah, so there has been some work done on it but I don't think I don't know what they're doing what they're doing these days. And there's one other point I wanted to go back to with Jessica and that is both you and I recognize the numerous points of the exercise of discretion in cases. And the question is, do you see any places where you think that discretion could be more confined? And I'm thinking of years ago that when states were experimenting with sentencing guidelines and in North Carolina they didn't do it to eliminate racial disparities but they did it to get people out of jail basically. So they confined the discretion of judges and gave them less discretion and lo and behold they really reduced their racial disparities in sentencing. So I mean that's just one area that judges of course hate sentencing guidelines but are there areas in the system where you think there could be less discretion or more restrictions on discretion? More standards maybe that could be used. I guess I don't think of it so much as points where there could be more standards but points where there could be more neutral people who get involved. An example I'm thinking of is sort of right at the outset of law enforcement response to a situation. Having a system in which mental health or substance use counselors maybe are brought in to assess a situation from the beginning to see if maybe a treatment intervention or a mental health intervention is appropriate in a situation and not just leaving it to a police officer to decide whether someone should be arrested or not. You know again, I mean maybe that's just passing discretion to someone else but I think of it more in terms of how can we, how can someone coming from a more neutral perspective intervene at these different stages? I guess I related my reaction to sentencing guidelines is I think similar to that. Judge Pearson has been really involved on the advisory panel that Gary and Rebecca and I are on and Stephanie actually presented to that panel as well. And you know I think he actually expressed some ideas about ways that the judiciary could be more involved to sort of put more checks on prosecutors in terms of exercising their discretion. Well yeah, that's why I was wondering when I was thinking about standards, is there some way for them to satisfy some kind of accountability standard? Even if you leave all that discretion with the prosecutors, one defendant visa be another. Who gets charged? What, is there some way to review that? I mean obviously the state police is using all kinds of data for accountability. How could we inject some accountability on the prosecutorial because they really have even more discretion in some ways than judges. Right, absolutely. I mean they make all the decisions, you know, they get to the side of the case, goes forward or not at all. And what makes it even more complicated is that you know every county in the state is different. Like it's different for me. System that you go through if you are charged with a crime is wildly different depending on what county you get arrested in. I don't know, I think we're seeing audience. Yeah, sort of checking the discretion of prosecutors. One idea that has been possible who talked about it, diversion. These other ways to get whether it's law enforcement making the calls, the prosecutors, do you get it out of the formal criminal justice system that the courts need, diversion? These alternative, right now the law is that only a prosecutor can decide that. Only prosecutor and there's legislation afoot where the Supreme Court gets enough support that allows the judge to override the prosecutor. And that is a great way to check or have these checks and balances. Diversion and another example would be something called a deferred sentence. So a deferred sentence is a conviction where someone gets sentenced and placed on probation so community supervision. But at the end of a successful probation term, the conviction is actually expunged essentially and sealed and so it's as if the person never had the conviction. And again, right now statutes sort of largely put the power to agree to a deferred sentence in the hands of the prosecutor and Judge Gerson would like the power to the judges to have more power, more discretion to override essentially and sentence a defendant to a deferred sentence even if a prosecutor may not agree. Well, one thought I had given the diversity of the state's attorneys in each county and their attitude would be wouldn't it be great if the public in the counties would actually hold something to say, okay, what are you doing, Mr. Prosecutor, Ms. Prosecutor, to eliminate bias? Tell us what you're doing. And maybe we won't vote for people if you don't. Yeah, that's another way to bring somebody to account, yeah. One other thing I'll add is that, I talked about these stages of the process and before cases get in the hands of prosecutors or judges, law enforcement had decided to send a case or a youth for an adult to a diversion or a community justice center. State-wide, the Attorney General Office is trying to make what we generally refer to as sort of like pretrial services and these alternative programs, alternative prosecution, more consistent from county to county so that I think that that is one way that we are trying to minimize the discretion of sort of who gets, you know, so that who gets offered diversion or who gets offered a restorative process at a community justice center is going to be, should ideally be based more on sort of like a risk assessment or some sort of more neutral or standardized decision-making process so that there's less discretion about, you know, this youth is gonna get to go to the community justice center and engage in a restorative justice panel versus this youth is gonna go through the linguistic process. So that is becoming, or the goal is for that to be more standardized from county to county so we won't see any disparities based on things like race but also people with disparities based on where you happen to live. Here. Yeah, I have a question for the accountant Scott. You've had, the state police have had, I suppose hundreds of people you've recruited and tested and trained and brought through the system in the last 15 years. If the problem is negative stereotyping and you may, it may have another way of describing it, are there other attributes of recruitment, testing and career development which could go wrong at the center, which is highly associated with the behavior of negative stereotyping. So that if you were this other factor, factor A, which might be, I don't know what it would be, let's say for example, brought up in a stable family, we've got to make that up, yeah. If you were to address that factor A more successfully, the negative stereotyping issue may recede. So yeah, I hear what you're saying how do we address that and how do they meet the values of our agency too, right? So that's the tricky part of when we look into someone's background to see what they're bringing to the table and how they answer the questions and then they can do all that and still make it through the process and then they're on the road and they may still have exactly all the things we don't want them because they get sent to the Northeast Kingdom and they interact with very few people of color, but those all go bad on us. But most of 98% of their day is usually fine, right? But now, so these problems can still percolate underneath the surface without us really ever seeing it. So that's, it's a challenge that we have to think about all the time and how we are trying to address it is by having outside entities look at our data and try to pinpoint that down a little bit so it's externally generated to look at and then when we have these problems, you know, how do we again sort of really tackle it because the numbers are sometimes so small that we realize they can still be there. So it's, we've had these trainings for many years now and now we're in the stage of re-adjusting our trainings to see what some of this hasn't worked all that well, some of it has worked. We're getting closer to stuff we mentioned, but there's still a disparate gap there and we can't account for it and we don't know why. And I don't think nationally people can really say why it's still there all the time. Yes, it's a deep process, right? It's a process, right? I have a question about the imprisonment rate and to give Michelle Alexander's book and the enormous injustices of people of color incarcerated across the nation and that it's really just millions of people as we know that are invisibleized to most of us in the larger white world. And so I can't think of a more powerful indictment of white supremacy in the state than the figures of mass imprisonment and I appreciate the positive conversations we're having tonight, but I still am not really much clearer on how to understand them no matter why are so many people of color imprisoned. What are the best answers that we have to that and what are the steps of any that are underway that are really trying to take that on? Why are not folks in corrections here tonight? I don't understand the role of the sheriff's departments and their enormous latitude. There's any number of additional factors we could look at. I'm just wondering if we can enlarge focus and look at that because I think it's a terrible right for the people who are incarcerated and it's a terrible stain for this state that seeks to see itself as a progressive state and a leader. I think Rebecca wants to say something about it. I'll just speak to this issue. One of the factors and this is also true in policing as well but especially in the sentencing disparities is that typically when prosecutors and charge and judges make decisions, they look at the past criminal record of this person. Well, if this person has already experienced discrimination in the past, there's a sedimentation of that discrimination over time. So I see this when I do right along to the police and they stop somebody and they get back in the car and call the dispatcher to see if this person is at any prior tickets or infractions. Well, if you're constantly stopped as Falundo Castile was 46 times and however many years and you're a target of the police then your record is going to reflect not that you're a bad person but that you've been discriminated against. And I don't think that we in Vermont are at a place that we have the sophistication in understanding that in terms of sentencing and even in terms of policing. You know, I've talked to the Burlington Police Department about this and they say for example that there's a higher ticket rate of African-Americans and they often seek to try to justify it. And I wish they would do more to interrogate what's actually the cause but one of the things that former chief del poser told me is that it's because people of color are more likely to drive with suspended sentences because they can't afford to pay their tickets. And my response to that is then think about your policies around giving tickets. If you now understand that that's the cause of the disparity then adjust your policies. I think that needs to be done at every stage of the system and we haven't gotten there yet. It doesn't seem just an obvious point of an extraordinary lack and I'm not sure what words to use of the entire notion of corrections and where our conversations about de-incarceration about simply just looking at the system as the flawed, profoundly flawed system that it is and calling for significant changes far more than we really converse about. And this goes to Anne's point earlier about being active in your county and holding your county, you know, state's attorney's office accountable for how they are addressing criminal justice in your county because I think that to me that is a big part of the answer is that, you know, even if we significantly reduced the numbers of people that we incarcerate in this state that does not necessarily automatically mean that we are going to lower the disparity, right? We could still maybe have the same disparity even if you put fewer people in jail. But putting fewer people in jail is one way to get started. You know, if we're not sending anybody to jail then we don't have to worry about if we're sending more people of color to jail than white people. And so I think, you know, and this is not the thing we addressed as a panel or in our report or anything. So I'm just speaking as an individual and I don't mean to turn this into like a prison abolition conversation. Like to me that's part of the answer that we in Vermont and in America are too punitive and need to be more humane and be moving away from incarceration as our response to every harm. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Is there any means that the judicial retention process could be used to collect or identify data that's involved if the survey process could look at judicial sentencing patterns as part of the retention process? It could. I mean, right now I don't think that the judicial retention process does anything but unless it's changed since I left the court but poll lawyers and, you know, the kind of comments you get from lawyers about your performance as a judge are a lot dependent on whether that lawyer won or lost against in front of you. The comments are rarely useful. If a trial judge who, you know, trial judge is much more on the front line, if they've had a controversial case, of course they can really be slammed at retention but I don't think anybody is collecting any data on that. That's up to the legislature and that might be something legislature could do. Possibilities, there's a pretty comprehensive system. There may be some adjustments that can, if it doesn't necessarily have to be the lawyer's survey, you get the retention committee. It's a readout of every case that the judge has heard in the outcome and I would assume that would happen. But somebody's gotta collect that and analyze it and yeah, that's a huge process. I'm not sure what the legislature does with those cases but unless a particular case is brought to their attention, I doubt if they're doing that kind of really comprehensive look at the judges who are up for retention. They are. They are? Yeah, speaking from attorneys, the data is simply to prove, not just the specific complaints by attorneys but the whole data list that you're looking for anomalies to begin with. But there's no racial data in there, right? No, that's my question, I don't think there is but I don't see the reason why not the individual surveys of attorneys but the survey of the docket. Yeah. You know, you're collecting data that's in the docket sheet from the trial judges that are up for retention. Six years of data, it's a fairly large data center, just as likely. Edie. A couple of times it was mentioned that at least on the prosecutorial end of things, there are great differences from county to county. Could somebody elaborate on that? Why should that be so? Well, I'm from the People's Republic of Chittenden, so I'm going to stand here. I can sort of speak to, I can give an example of differences, right? So in Chittenden County, Sarah George is our state's attorney and she would definitely describe herself as a part of a progressive prosecutor movement. She, you know, when the expose came out about the Chittenden County jail, she immediately reviewed what women were there on Chittenden County cases and where appropriate, she agreed to their release. I think she is starting to try to collect data on, with race as a factor to identify who, you know, her office is asking to hold in jail, who, you know, what sort of sentences, people of color are getting in Chittenden County. Then I hear that in other counties, Rutland being like sort of a prime example, in Rutland, they are backed up years waiting for trials because the state's attorney's office policy is to essentially not really negotiate to impose or offer extremely high sentences. So I'm not necessarily talking about wildly different outcomes based on race. I am just talking in general wildly different outcomes if you are charged with a crime, depending on what county you're in, depending on the philosophy and the approach to criminal justice of the elected state's attorney in that county. It's all about discretion again. I think we have to recognize a lot of the reason it's different is these are elected offices and they reflect the voting. I mean, we have to start with us. We have to recognize each of us. We implicit biases that we bring and how we address that because we have to ask questions when we elect people because I think you'll find that the prosecutors in the county generally reflect the culture of that county. You have to recognize that and you have to work all of us. You can't just load it all on police or someone else. Yes, I think there are issues out there. We have to recognize that amended with specs is the reflection of each of us in the act. I think I'll pull it from there. Yes. I just want to emphasize that you're saying that the use of alternatives to punitive responses to crime and so in all the counties and the short of justice centers, so I'm involved with not clear one. We have, since our current state's attorney does not make the referrals that the former state's attorney's have made in the past. We're really struggling with that. It's very frustrating because the data that we do collect shows a decrease in lucidism and re-entry is very powerful. That is voluntary. You can't have a judge order that as to the person's choice. I do not know of any people of color who've come through our re-entry, but did a lot of things involved with who gets excuses for that. Makes it as an option to them, is offered it as an option, I should say. But restorative justice alternative is extraordinarily powerful. I've been involved with it myself for over 20 years and it doesn't solve the problem of all the front-end stuff of the arrests or the charging, but pre-charge is extremely powerful and the idea of having it, judges having an opportunity to override a state's attorney's decision on that is also, I haven't heard that before and I think that would be a great opportunity throughout the state. I'll just also make a quote. Restorative justice is very different than diversion. Diversion is an option, but it's not a restorative practice and I just want to point that out and please vote for your state's attorneys. Careful. Well, to that very last comment, the last thing I was going to add about the state's attorneys is that from what I've seen generally, they are, the elections are rarely contestant. Right. Once you become a state's attorney and you essentially can pull that position until you don't want to anymore. So, and again, not to forget that I don't have any issues with how Sarah Torch runs the Chinden County State's Attorney's Office, but she did say in a form that she was on a panel on last week that she wishes that every state's attorney's election was contested. So, encourage, if you know the lawyers in your counties, there's usually to be encouraging them to run. Thank you to our panel. We need to close it first tonight, but it'd be for developing.