 So I'm going to call this meeting to order. It is 6 0 5 p.m. May 24, 2022. We have one, two, three, four, five commissioners. So the attorney and Shannon as support. Are there any additional modifications to the agenda? I am not seeing or hearing any. Which is onto approving the minutes from our special commission meeting on for 2022 and the minutes from our regular Christian meeting on 426. That's a typo should be 2022 not 2021. All in favor of approving the minutes from the last two meetings with I guess that's a change of the regular church meetings is to change it to 426 22. Raise your hand or say, I'm sorry. I do have a second for that to prove messages seconded by shrink. Yes. You're combining both the meetings together and I was only present for one. I wasn't present for the executive meeting. Okay. I guess in that case, I'll hold two separate. I'll hold two separate votes then. Those in favor of voting for the fort. Approving the minutes for mom for 2022. If you're present, raise your hand or say, I, I'm sorry, if you are in favor and we're present. Raise your hand. Hi. Hi. Can I just make a comment? Am I. Yes. Misunderstanding these minutes. I don't see the motion that we voted on here. Do you see the content of the motion? Am I missing that in the minutes? Do you know Shannon, if you, you included the content. The motion. Sorry, I'm looking at way too many screens to navigate through. Give me just one second. And this is from the, not the special meeting. But the regular meeting on the 26. Correct. Okay. Okay. I think that two things should be included. One is that the draft response, I think should be part of the minutes for ease. So that people don't have to go back and look at it. And so please disagree with me if you don't agree, that's fine. But just a thought and also the content of the motion should be there as well. I hope you're not waiting for a response from me. I'm not. I'm not there. Okay. So if you want me to add it, then I certainly can do that. Okay. I'm, you know, I see what other people think, but could we, I don't know how to handle this. But I would just say that I would ask that the minutes be amended to include the full motion that we voted on. I have no objections to that. Anybody else. Okay. So that's the memo that we sent as part of the minutes. No objection either. It just, if people have to go back, it saves having to search for those documents. Yeah. That memo was part of the board docs that night. Right. So yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. Okay. So if you all agree with that, how do we handle this voting on the minutes then just. Well, I was making originally I'm making the one for the 420 special session. So. Okay. Get through that. And then we'll be able to do the, the regular meeting. That's not good. Okay. So. Those approving the minutes from the special meeting on four 2022. Raise your hand and say aye. Aye. Okay. If you weren't present, then I, sorry, Kevin, you were, you were present of that one. Correct. I'm sorry. I was present for the regular meeting. The public meeting, not executive. Okay. So the special meeting on four 20, four 20, you, you were not present at that one then. Right. Correct. Okay. Then, okay. So let me do a review of that because I believe you did vote. Yes for that. So. So for the meetings on four 20, 20, 22. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. On the special meeting. All in favor of approving those minutes that were present. Rachel going to say aye. Can I, I'm so sorry again, but I don't see them on board docs. I see where it says. We approve the minutes, but I don't actually see the minutes. If you click, if you click on that 2.01. And then on the kind of like the more, the bigger thing. If you click. View minutes. It'll pop up. Yeah. Yeah. It's not working for me, but. Sorry. Can you remind me what the meeting was about? Yes. We. Discuss draft your response to the ordinance of police accountability and oversight. That was the meeting. We can wait and do this. Nothing says we have to approve it this month. Do you want, we can have it amended. Well, no, that's the other meeting, but certainly we can wait until you have a chance to look at them. Yeah. Okay. In that case, then I propose that we table table for these minutes to add to our next meeting. And ask Shannon to amend. The minutes to the regular meeting to include the motion and the draft bill. Yeah. I believe. Hey, Lee, do we need. Can we just email them? Yeah. Yeah, I believe. Hey, Lee, do we need, can we just email her to add those amendments or do we have to do that? Or can we just table this meeting? Table approved minutes now and email. Shannon asking here to a mention of our committee minutes, or do we have to do that now? No, you can, you can certainly table this to the next meeting and the draft minutes are, are the, are sort of a creature of the commission. So whatever you say goes in terms of a, amending them, if you wanted to adopt them as is tonight within amendment, I would, I would hold a vote to adopt with that amendment, but certainly if you want to continue to work with Shannon to make sure that they're accurate, then just table it and we can move that to the next meeting. Sounds good. I think it as this, as of the time because once you lose terrain, we lose a quorum or actually no, we don't. Sorry. But anyway, we're going to move that to the next meeting. So we're going to move that to the next meeting. So as of the time I say we just table the minutes, work with Shannon in the meantime, and they go from there. All they were tabling, the voting of these minutes to our next meeting. Raise your hand or say aye. Aye. Aye. That passes unanimously. Moving on to agenda item 3.0. Sorry. I'm sorry, chairman Agamash. I just wanted to mention, to commissioner Segwino's point, the 2.01 does not seem to have the link to the minutes. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. All right. Maybe I'm just. Maybe I'm, I don't know why it's, it's probably the links work. I'm both on my end. So I'm curious as to why that is. But all right then. Sorry. Because I'm in it. Oh, no, that. Well, I'm seeing both things on my mind over here. So I did miss who seconded the motion. I apologize. Sure. All right. Moving on to item 3.01 public forum of anyone is, it's in the public. I was saying that attendees. And would like to make a public comment, please raise your hand. And you'd be forwarded to the panel. And I'll also ask Shannon, did anybody email you with a request to speak? So I didn't have anybody sign up to speak. All right. And again, if there's anybody in the attendees, I would like to speak. Please raise your hand and refer to the panelists. Not seeing or hearing any. Moving on. All right. Two agenda item 4.01, which is anticipated record session time circuit for 30 minutes. And sorry. Okay. With that, I move to make a specific findings that the premature general public knowledge of discussions of union contract negotiations between the city and the BPOA would clearly face a city. Or even as a state of disadvantage. And therefore I moved to enter executive session to discuss the BPOA city contract negotiations. Pursuant to one VSA 313 a one a. Do I have a second. Seconded by. Okay. Yeah. Thanks. I'm going to go to the co-chair. So we know. All in favor, raise your hand and say aye. Aye. All right. This is a time certain. Meeting we're going to jump start immediately. So with that being said, I, my plan is to start. I say. Yes. I'm sorry. There should have been two motions that were included there. I just wanted to make sure we hit on both of those because they both are important. All right. You mentioned that one and two, those two separate motions, not just one and the same. Okay, my apologies then. So I guess the first one is the first one should be to make the finding and then the second one should actually be to enter executive session. So I just want to make sure we hit those both. All right, motion one, I'm going to make a specific finding that premature general public knowledge of discussions of the union contract negotiation between the city and the BPA would clearly place the city or union at substantial disadvantage. Second. So, Stephanie hand first second by Stephanie. All of them are going to say aye. Aye. Aye. That passes unanimously. And the second motion is just to enter executive session to discuss BPA and city contract negotiations pursuant to one BSA 313 a one a. We have a second second by Stephanie. All of them are going to say aye. Aye. That passes unanimously. And with that for the public I ask that you either hang tight or just are jumped back in on this meeting in 32 minutes I assume I'll think about two minutes for others to get into that next meeting and it's a 30 minute time, certain so yeah, we'll see you all at 648. All right, it is 649 and we have resumed from the session. I'll put the agenda here. All right. With that, I give the floor to chief mirad for the chief report. I'm sorry chief you're still muted. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you very much. Let me call up the presentation. Just one moment. May I share my screen, sir? Yeah, go ahead. That's fine. Can everybody see that? Thank you. So I'll move through the chief's presentation quickly. I know there's a large agenda and I know John has a time certain. And I'm eager to get to that report. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. These are the same data that we share each month, just for consistency sake. And also for the fact that I think that people from the public do go to the transparency portal to see these. We see that our call volume is up. Our incident volume is up so far this year. It is still not in line with previous years. Although that. That diminishment becomes a lot less if we remove traffic and foot patrol. That shows that the overall decrease over the past several years has been 24% versus 40%. If we don't have traffic and foot patrol, that's a significant amount of this. We have stacked about 14% of our incidents this year. I expect that number to rise for a couple of reasons. Most of which I'll actually touch on in the second presentation, you've asked me to give, which is, which centers on the downtown plan and also a change to our, our priority response model. Here's another visualization of total incidents that we see. Again, it's scooping up a little bit. It's starting to widen a bit, but it is still not in line with previous years. Priority ones, however, are higher than they've ever been. They are higher than they've been the past six years. And that is significant. It's certainly significant for our deployments. Simply because these are the real calls to which we are required. And the ones that require the most resources. Often the most time. Here are the selected Valcore incidents that we've been tracking for many police commission sessions now. The, we'll see that there's a number that are not going in the right direction. Aggregated larceny is higher than it has been. And I believe that what the annual report is going to show is that those numbers were higher than that for 2021, those numbers were higher than they had been in quite some time. That was true also of mental health issues of overdoses of other kinds of incident volume. We're not seeing that change and aggregated larceny. That's larceny from a building larceny from a vehicle larceny other and larceny from a person is higher than it has been in the past six years. Mental health issues also trending up overdose still higher than we want it to be. We are seeing high rates of burglary, high rates of vehicle theft, and high rates of aggravated and simple assault. One extremely troubling trend has been gunfire. And in since our last meeting, there have been five gunfire incidents. That brings the total for this year to 10. Since 2012, there have been a 51 of such of those incidents. 36 of them have occurred in the last three years since 2020. We are now at a higher rate than we've had in previous years and it's May. It is mid May. The incidents themselves are listed in that table. Some of these photographs are from the most recent incident that occurred inside city hall park at four in the morning. These gunfire incident numbers are small. But by percentage, they are concerning with regard to their relative increase from previous years. And also by percentage, the racial representations in them are stark. We have 80% of racially identified victims. That's 20 of 25 of those 51 incidents are black. And 60% of racially identified suspects. That's 21 of 35 of those incidents are black. There are instances obviously of the 51 total that we don't have victims or that we end in which we don't have suspects. But we know that a discharge occurred. And we are able to track it as a gunfire incident. This is another way of looking at gunfire incidents by calendar day and by time of day. So what this shows is the calendars of 2020, 2021 and 2022 so far. And you'll see those red marks are the gunfire incidents in 2020. There were two incidents that occurred on one day. Excuse me, there were two days that had two incidents each. And in 2022, there has been one day that has had two incidents on a single day. And so the, you'll, if you count those, you won't get a dozen for 2020. You'll get 10. And if you look at 2021, you should have 14. And for 2022, it's not 10. I believe it's nine squares that are colored. What we see, I think is that, although certainly things hover in the weekend, certainly we do see upticks as the weather warms. There is no rhyme or pattern to these. They are infrequent enough and rare enough alarming as they may be that using their occurrence for deployment determinations is difficult. The other thing that makes that difficult is that their time of day is not all that lumpy. The time of day is quite clear from zero. They occur between midnight and 6 a.m. with more frequency than any other time of day. That is, however, the time of day where our other calls for service, all types are by far the lowest. And it makes determining, it makes deploying in those times difficult. Particularly with regard to reallocating resources when our resources are as depleted as they currently are. This is another picture of a heat map. Again, if we look at those hours around gunfire around the clock, and this, by the way, is only that picture of gunfire around the clock is only tracking the 36 incidents that have occurred from 2020 through 2022. This is not tracking the other fewer than 20 incidents that occurred prior to 2020. This, however, heat map is incidents up through 2019. I haven't had a chance to make a newer graphic of this. But call volume with such larger numbers, these are all incidents. So these are 30,000, 20,000, 28,000 incidents per year. That volume has not changed substantially over the past three years, despite the pandemic being an anomalous year, or year and a half rather. But you see that the period from the exact period that has the most of those gunfire incidents is also the period where other kinds of calls are the slowest. Actually, almost slow to a crawl to the point where there's almost none on some nights. It makes deploying challenging. The other thing that makes deploying challenging is, of course, our continually diminishing headcount. This is a graphic of our priority one incidents through 2021. It doesn't show where we are yet in 2022. As you know, from the first slide, 2022 is thus far higher than any other year, but we don't know where it'll end for the total year. So the superimposed on that is our headcount, which currently stands at 66. I'm sorry, this one says 65. It should be 66 by apologies. It will be 65 tomorrow. There's an officer whose last day is tonight, but it is 66 total and 57 available. From that, we take the nine who are currently on leave of various kinds, injury leave, military leave, one officer at the Vermont police academy. We take supervisors, we take detectives, we take airport officers, special assignment officers, and that leaves us with 23 officers available for patrol. And that will bring me, we're working to other, to build other capacity, of course, as we talked about before, we lost the CSO to a very terrific job opportunity in New Hampshire. We are currently at seven CSOs and three CSLs. And those roles are performing very well, particularly the CSLs. The CSOs are really important as well. I worked bar closing on Saturday night and stood at the corner of a church in Maine with one of those CSOs for quite some time until the rain became really ridiculously bad. And we both turned in, but it is, it's great to have them available for a variety of different calls. And some of those calls are increasing as I'll discuss in this page, but I will save this for the discussion about the downtown deployment plan. And so I will stop my share at this point, unless anybody wants to ask specific questions about those previous data pages before I stop the share. And if you can hear me in gunfire incidents, can you talk about where they're from? Do you mean whether they're from Burlington or not? It varies. It varies. John Larson's report indicates that about 50% of the people with whom we deal are from Burlington. Another, I think, what was the number? I want to say 30% are from Vermont and then the remaining are from out of state. I would guess that it's approximately the same for gunfire. It may actually be more, it may be more homegrown. Certainly, there have been some prominent gunfire incidents that have involved people who are not from Burlington, but there have been many others where people have been from Burlington. Yes, it's very important because we've struggled with these details, getting these details, especially when we look at use of firearms, the use of force tactics. This should be very, very careful because I do, when I look at the press releases, I am looking at certain situations and I am, you know, trying to have an understanding of, you know, what we're seeing. I mean, obviously we live in Burlington, so we care about Burlington the most, but I'm sure we've all read about the situation down in Springfield and in other areas. This is unfortunately a trend that is through the state of Vermont and national. So I want us to be very careful and I think it's worth it, looking at numbers of people who are actually, you know, because quite frankly, our drug situation has gotten out of hands. There's a thirst in this area for certain products and it is being satiated by people coming in from out of state. So I think it's important to really know what these percentages are because we want to be very careful about profiling. We already have issues where we're profiling our black residents. I just find some of the language to be very speculative and I want us to be very careful about being, you know, too inflammatory because unfortunately we have a lot of people who latch on to that. I don't want to profile anyone commissioner. I don't want to profile people from out of state or in state. And whether a person is from Burlington or not has nothing to do with whether or not we use force on that individual. And it has nothing to do with whether or not we investigate that individual. We address people based on their behavior. Mr. Chair, Madam Chair, anything else? Dr. Percy, does this conclude other chief support? Yes, as I said, the very next slide brings me into the next piece that you've asked me to do, but I can wait on that until Jono begins, or I can start it and then cut off wherever I am when Jono's time certain begins. It is up to you. I think my list lumped that all together to keep it nice and neat. I know I had, Jon started time service at 15, but if you are ready now to give your presentation, I think we're happy to take it. Yeah, I'm ready now. Awesome. Everybody, this is Jono Larson. I will let you introduce your proper title because I, sorry, I don't recall it. No problem. Yeah, so hi everyone. Thank you so much for having me. My name is Jonathan Larson. Everyone calls me Jono. My title is city data analyst. And I work in the office of city planning. And the director of city planning is also on, is there any questions that she needs to address? But for the most part, I'll be presenting tonight. And I was the one who wrote the report. Awesome. I'll jump right in then. Shannon, would you mind promoting? Or do they get the title? Leave the person with the hand raised permitting. Awesome. Floor is here. Take it away. Awesome. So I'll just share my screen. So bear with me firmly. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. I want to jump in. One last thing I ask commissioners any substantive questions, please. Hold up to the very end of the report. Any clarifying questions? I. Is that a problem to ask any clarifying questions in the middle of the report? Not a problem at all. Go ahead. Awesome. Awesome. Thank you. Yeah. Can everyone see that? Awesome. And I'm playing on using my mouse as a pointer. Can you see my mouse moving? Okay. Great. So I'll just make this full screen. Okay. So. This is an overview for what I'll be talking about tonight. So I'll start by addressing the addendum that was posted yesterday to board docs. Then I'll make a plug for the public data that we have available online regarding pleasing activities. And then I'll dive into the report and talk about just some highlights from these sections. Okay. So the report is pretty long. So I'm just going to pull out a couple of tables. And plots to share. And then we'll end with questions. So starting off with the addendum. So as you know, the. The report itself was posted publicly on board docs on Friday. And then the chief alerted us that there were a couple of errors in how certain charges or crimes. Were categorized with respect to whether they were felonies or misdemeanors. So I had accidentally categorized some felonies as misdemeanors. So staff in our department went through every charge. And the Vermont statutes to fix those errors. And then also correct any affected. Tables or graphs. And then those corrected tables and graphs were posted in this addendum yesterday. And so that's available on board docs. And so that's the report. And so that's the report. And this presentation that I'm giving now is going to use the corrected information. So I really wanted to plug all the data that we have available online for anyone to use. Starting off with previous reports. So this is the second annual report for the Burlington police department. There was a previous one last year. And both. That report. And then also previous reports. If you're interested in one of the other reports, There's also the reports that says the police have asked you to review the reports that go to the force or staffing. Those are all available online at these two different links. We also post data on a monthly basis. Online. And you can access it in two different ways. We have a data dashboard that's interactive. And that's at this link on the Burlington Vermont website and the police section. And then if you're interested in accessing line level data. if you have any questions about any of this data, definitely feel free to contact me. And then the final thing that I wanted to make a plug for is these de-identified summaries of uses of force that anyone can access, they're on the police department website at this link. And so this gives more information and context to uses of force since January 2021. So I definitely really want to encourage people to check out these different sources of data. Okay, so diving into the report itself, as the chief already brought up, about half of the people that the Burlington police interacted with in 2021 were Burlington residents. So you can see from this table that about 17,000 people, non-officers interacted with Burlington police officers in 2021. So these are 17,000 unique individuals. Most of them had residence information in our database, and about 53% of those people are Burlington residents. Of the rest, most are from Vermont, but just not Burlington. And then you have a few people who are, well, over a thousand people who do not reside in Vermont. So those are unique individuals, 17,000 unique individuals. But some, most of those individuals interacted with the police one time in 2021. But there was sort of a big range of how many times those individuals interacted with the police. So that's what this plot is intended to get at. If you're seeing it for the first time, I acknowledge that it is a little confusing. So I'm going to walk you through it. So here on the horizontal access, we're talking about the percentage of unique individuals. So at 100%, we would have those 17,000 unique people. On the vertical access, we have these person incidents. So this is just a way of counting if a single individual interacts with the police five times in 2021, we're going to count those five times five times. Similarly, if you have a single incident, but five people in it, we want to count each of those individuals uniquely. And so that would be five person incidents. So person incidents, I acknowledge that it's sort of a confusing term, but you can think of it as like unique contacts. So if you go down to this 2% here, 2% of unique individuals in 2021 account for 20% of police contacts in 2021. Similarly, 5% of individuals account for 31% of police contacts in 2021. So what this is telling us is that you have a few people, a small group of people, relatively small group of people, who interact with the police a lot and account for a lot of police contacts. So that's what this sort of plot from the report tells us. Turning on to incidents, overall police incidents have been decreasing from since 2015. So you can see that the high end 2015 was about 37,000. And in 2021, we were between 21,000 and 22,000 priority one incidents increased from 2020 to 2021. So in 2020, there are about 1800 priority one incidents. And then in 2021, there were about 2000. Moving on. So something we included in the report was a comparison of how specific incident types have changed in the two years or from the two years prior to the pandemic to the time during the pandemic. So this table, or excuse me, this plot is comparing pre and post. So the blue is pre and the purple is post. Pre is the two years before March 13, 2020, which is when the state of emergency was declared in Vermont. And then post is the two years since March 13, 2020. And so on the horizontal axis, we have counts. And then on the vertical axis, we have different incident types. So you can see, for example, that traffic had a little over 4,000, there are a little over 4,000 traffic incidents in those two years prior to the pandemic. But then during the pandemic, there were only a little more than 1000 crashes, similarly decreased, and intoxication similarly decreased. So these are absolute counts in these two time periods. We also included in the report percentage change. So these are the same incident types, but they're just in a different order from the previous slide. And they're now ordered by percentage change. So you can see that gunfire had the greatest increase. I should note that since we're talking about gunfire, this is not explicitly an incident type. This is tracked separately from incident types. But we thought it was relevant for this pre-post pandemic comparison. In addition to noting that it's not explicitly an incident type, it's worth noting that although it had the greatest percentage increase, if you go back one slide, you can see that the absolute counts or the magnitude in absolute numbers is relatively small. So that's worth noting. So you can see that what increased in terms of percentages in that pre-to-post pandemic period were gunfire, graffiti, stolen vehicles, overdoses, and so on. Moving on to traffic stops. Traffic stops have been decreasing since about 2015. So in 2015, there were over 6000 traffic stops. In 2021, there were just under 700. In 2021, black motorists were underrepresented among traffic stops for the first time in the past few years. So just to walk through this plot. So I mentioned black motorists specifically. So black motorists are represented on this plot in this gold color with the triangles that would be up here. The solid line is the percentage of stopped motorists who are black in this case. The dashed line is the percentage of motorists and crashes who are black. And so we're using crash data as a benchmark, as opposed to, for example, census data, because among people who are counted as census, we don't necessarily know who drives and who doesn't drive. There's more information about this in the report, but it's worth just stating that the dashed line is sort of the benchmark that we're using. And you can see that in 2021, the percentage of motorists who are stopped who, percentage of, yes, motorists who are stopped who are black is lower than the percentage of motorists and crashes who are stopped. So that's a good thing. That's the first time that's happened in a few years. Moving on to arrests. So trends for arrests for violent crimes vary by race and severity. So on this plot, I just have violent felonies and violent misdemeanors. And in the next slide, I'll talk about the nonviolent felonies and misdemeanors. It's worth noting as well that this violent designation, that's not, that's not an objective designation. For felony versus misdemeanor, that's an objective category. So a felony is any crime for which the maximum penalty is greater than two years. And so that's something you can look up in Vermont statutes and verify. Violent versus nonviolent, that's going to be subject to opinion. So this was how we categorized these crimes, but I'm sure reasonable people might disagree. So anyway, so this plot focuses specifically on white and black arrestees. So you can see that for violent felonies, the number of white arrestees has bounced around sort of the same range since 2012. We do see that for black arrestees, there's been an increase since about 2017. When we're talking about violent misdemeanors, you can see that the number of white arrestees has been decreasing in fits and starts since 2012. And maybe stayed about the same for black arrestees. So it depends on the severity. When it comes to violent crimes, it depends on the severity and race. Moving on to nonviolent crimes, felonies on the left and misdemeanors on the right, there's a bit more, it's a bit more the same across race. And that for nonviolent felonies, it's, there isn't really a trend that you see across the past 10 years, an increase certainly in 2016, but there's been variability for sure. And the same is true for black arrestees for nonviolent felonies. It's a little more clear, there's a little bit more of a clear trend for nonviolent misdemeanors, where you see that among white, the number of white arrestees for nonviolent misdemeanors has been decreasing with the exception of this increase in 2019, since about 2015. And then the number of black arrestees for nonviolent misdemeanors has been decreasing steadily since 2016. Moving on now to uses of force. In the upper left hand corner here, we have total numbers of uses of force. So you can see that there was an increase from 2020 to 21, from 160 in 2020 to 188 in 2021. And then we also have here in the upper right hand corner, number of uses of force against white people in the lower left hand corner against black people, and then in the lower right hand corner against Asian people. So a slight increase here for white people from 2020 to 21, and then an increase of 19 here for black subjects of force, and an increase of four. I apologize that the numbers here are a little blocked by the dots. Focusing specifically on instances of officers pointing or displaying their gun. This is counted as use of force by Burlington police officers. So we see that again in the upper left hand corner we have total instances of this occurring. It almost doubled between 2020 and 2021. Among white subjects of force, it did double from 24 to 48. For black subjects of force, almost doubled from 22 to 41. And then among Asian subjects of force, it did double. So we do have this increase in pointing or displaying a firearm between 2020 and 2021. This year we looked at what incident types are more likely to involve force than others. So again, on this vertical axis, we have different incident types. And the horizontal axis has percent that involve the use of force. So up at the top we have aggravated assault. Those are the most likely incidents to have force involved with about a fifth of those incidents involving force. The next is drugs, disorderly conduct, two different types of assault and then search warrants. As addressed in the report, it might be worth noting that if you do not, if you recreate this chart without considering pointing or displaying a gun as a use of force, then the values for drugs and search warrant drops. And what that means is that these drug sale incidents and these search warrants incidents, they're likely to include or when forces use then, it's usually the case that the only type of force is pointing or displaying a firearm. And that's something we can for sure talk about more later. But for now, at least it's worth noting that some incidents are more likely to involve force than others. Now, one thing that we did was we looked at for different crime severities, what is the likelihood or for different arrest severities, we looked at what is the likelihood that force will be used against the person being arrested. So on this slide, I have violent felonies on the left and violent misdemeanors on the right. So violent crimes. And you can see that for the past 10 years or so, sorry, let me just explain what the lines mean. So each, so I've separated it by white arrestees and black arrestees. And what you're seeing each dot represent is the percentage of those arrestees who have force used against them. So just for example, this dot right here, this represents that almost 20% of white arrestees for violent felonies in 2020 had force used against them. And that's greater than the percentage of black arrestees for violent felonies, for example. So you can see that across the past 10 years, sometimes black arrestees are more likely to have force used against them. And sometimes white arrestees are more likely to have force used against them. And the same is true for these violent misdemeanors. So the rate of force used against arrestees for violent crimes is approximately equal when you're comparing black to white. If we turn out to nonviolent crimes, that is no longer the case. So again, this blue line is for the percentage of black arrestees who have force used against them. And so you can see that it's consistently greater than the line for white arrestees. And then that's for nonviolent felonies on the left. And then for nonviolent misdemeanors, it's true for almost every year with the exception of 2013. So this tells us that arrestees for nonviolent crimes, excuse me, black arrestees for nonviolent crimes are more likely to be subjects of force than white arrestees of nonviolent crimes. So that was actually all that I pulled out to talk about for the presentation specifically. But if you have questions about the report or other figures in the report, I do have that pulled up. So I can also share that if you have questions about that. I can answer questions about data. It is worth noting that I'm super happy to answer any questions about data or the report. If you ask questions about police operations, I will probably defer those questions to the chief. So thank you again. Awesome. Thank you so much, John, for that and the report. I guess I'll just jump right in and start. So then people can raise their hands and ask questions as they see fit. I guess this is more question for the chief. Based on that last slide, I guess for people at home, that is table 14, page 28 of the report. Yeah, could you explain that disparity and use the forces between for nonviolent offenses? Sure. I think a significant portion of it comes from the fact that I do not believe that disorderly conduct is a nonviolent offense. John and I had this discussion. I did identify, I went through, in the original document prior to the addendum, there were 15 incidents that were included in that picture of use of force. This picture right here, there's 15. So that blue line, that very striking and apparently alarming blue line, constitutes 15 incidents. Of those 15, three were, excuse me, four of the 15 were felonies. They were not misdemeanors. They were felonies, one for L and L, lewd and lascivious conduct, and three instances of impeding. Additionally, there are five incidents that are disorderly conduct fighting. Now disorderly conduct has several subcategories. It's got disorderly conduct fighting, it's got disorderly conduct impeding traffic, it's got disorderly conduct interrupting a public meeting, and it's got disorderly conduct foul language. The last that I mentioned is no longer constitution. You cannot use disorderly conduct for the courts have been up and down about it. The general consensus of the courts is you can't call, you can't hold somebody guilty or charge them with disorderly conduct merely for using profanity in public. Some places you can, if there's children around, for example, you can maybe make a case, somebody's swearing in a playground, but for the most part that is free speech. It's not a constitutional use, it's not one we ever use. So disorderly conduct foul language off the table, disorderly conduct interrupting a public event off the table. We occasionally use disorderly conduct with regard to interrupting traffic flow. It was something that we used once or twice during protests, but it is not a very common usage. The vast, vast majority of disorderly conduct is fighting people who are fighting in the streets. We don't have a victim because nobody's cooperative. We don't have a specific victim perhaps because nobody was extremely injured, but there was fighting in tumult. We know that people were fighting, we have video of that, we have witnesses of that, and we issue disorderly conduct citations. That is not a nonviolent crime. Of the 15, and I'll remove those four that I said were felonies, that'll leave us with 11, and all of these have been reported in our monthly reports. One involved a instance of drug possession, a person pointing firearms. We pointed firearms at that individual. We had reports of two college age black males wearing black and gray hoodies pushing their way into a residence and assaulting the caller. Officers arrived, they located two men in a car, and then found a third hiding under the car, and they ordered him out at gunpoint and search incident to lawful arrest, recovered cocaine from that individual. That's a use of force. Gunpoint for a person hiding under a car where you cannot see his hands and you don't know what he is doing, and there has been a call about a violent home invasion assault. A DUI with physical force used to prevent the driver from fleeing after he had crashed his vehicle. A negligent operation, this was a relatively sad instance. An elderly man who had driven erratically, he tried to elude officers, he crashed. Officers attempted to speak with him to have him get out of the vehicle, but he refused. He attempted to drive out away again. He was not in a fit frame of mind. He was pulled out of the vehicle gently, empty hand controls, but we did call it a use of force because it was more than non-compliant handcuffing, and it was more than mere compliance. A disorderly conduct fighting, a large fight with approximately 20 subjects at city market, it included a gunfire incident at that fight. Officers responded and held everyone at that incident at gunpoint and made them prone out until they could ascertain who did or didn't have a gun. One of those individuals ended up being cited for fighting because witnesses stated that he had been fighting. We still do not know who discharged the firearm at that incident, but because that individual was proned out at gunpoint, we call that a use of force, and that is an indication of an arrest for that fighting. One for methamphetamine possession. Again, pointing firearms, he was the subject of a search warrant with a drug crew out of Connecticut. There were three arrests in that, but two of them ended up being felony arrests. One of them ended up being a non-violent misdemeanor arrest for methamphetamine possession, but the firearm was pointed as a portion of the search warrant. Another with aggravated DC, which is disorderly conduct, but not against the public, but against a specific person, aggravated DC fighting. Again, we pointed firearms at that individual. There were calls for a fight at a residence, responding officers were told by a person fleeing the residence that the subject was inside, threatening to shoot anyone who went inside. Because of the threat of a firearm, the officers on scene drew their firearms, issued commands to the arrestee to exit the residence. He eventually did exit the residence at gunpoint, and they were able to observe that his hands were empty, and they took him into custody. That is an ag DC, should be a violent misdemeanor, and was a pointing of firearms use of force. The exact same individual just a few days later, again ag DC fighting. We were called because he was drunk at Cumberland farms. He was chasing customers and stealing bottles of wine. Officers attempted to arrest him. He fought with them, injuring two of them. They used OC spray and physical force. Another individual who was arrested with firearm pointed and physical force for cocaine possession. While driving, he struck a fully marked Burlington police department cruiser and fled. Officers located the suspect and initiated a traffic stop. He exited the vehicle and fled on foot. He was located a short time later in the backyard of a residence. The officer drew a firearm because he could not see the subject's hands. The subject fled again. The officer caught the subject trying to scale a fence and pulled the subject to the ground. After a brief struggle with the help of another officer, the subject was placed in handcuffs. That was a cocaine position arrest. Again, a nonviolent misdemeanor according to the law, but we did point firearms and use force. Another disorderly conduct fighting, a ground handcuffing, which means that basically the person had to be handcuffed on the ground, noncompliant handcuffing, but no other force than that. He threatened and attempted to strike employees at the other place bar with a closed fist. The first officer on scene observed the subject being held on the ground by a staff member. The officer took control of the subject, asking him to roll onto his stomach. The subject complied and the officer handcuffed him. But although that was compliant, it was on his stomach and we call that a use of force. Another disorderly conduct. This one is not disorderly conduct. It's one of the few, excuse me, disorderly conduct fighting. It's one of the few that is not. It was empty hand controls and an intoxicated female was observed attempting to operate a motor vehicle. Officers intervened and offered her a courtesy ride home. She declined. The officer started to leave, but they observed her once again try to enter the vehicle. At that point, they decided to take her into protective custody and she was resistant and that's the nature of the disorderly conduct charge and she was taken to detox. Another disorderly conduct fighting with a person well known to us for many, many instances, a firearm pointed at him and physical force. Firearm pointed because frequently with this individual, that is the safest procedure. Collars reported a fight allegedly involving a firearm. Responding officers observed subjects fighting over an unknown object. Believing that could be a firearm mentioned by the caller. The officers drew their firearms and pointed them at the males. One subject, a male white, was compliant and was handcuffed and taken into custody. The second subject, this individual we're talking about did not comply with and when attempts were made to take him into custody and he wanted to continue fighting with the first arrestee even as that arrestee was disengaging and being compliant. When the subject was distracted, an officer was able to bring him into a controlled manner to the ground. The officer was able to place the arrestee into handcuffs. The officer sustained a minor injury to his arm during this. The subject was not injured during this use of force. Those are the ones that were not felonies. That's all of those instances in that spike and none of those is an unjustified use of force. All of those have been accounted for and all of those have been publicly released and discussed in our monthly reports. Thank you, Shay. Appreciate that. I guess moving forward, I guess let's keep our questions for Jono specific and any, I guess, questions about substances for the chief afterwards. Anybody else with any questions for Jono? I think both Milo and I have questions. Milo, feel free to go ahead. So why the discrepancy? So Jono, you're interpreting it one way. The chief has, acting chief Morata stated why he disagrees with how you're characterizing. Can you explain how you're looking at it that would have you characterize it in a different way? So characterizing it as specifically disorderly conduct as a nonviolent offense. I mean, that was a historical decision that was made prior to my arrival here. And I think what needs to happen is the entire list of charges should be audited with law enforcement input to determine if each one is violent or nonviolent and try to come to a consensus. I would say, I mean, based on what the chief was saying, it sounds like for the most part, disorderly conduct is used for violent offenses. And I find that to be a compelling argument to categorize it as violent. I wish I could say how these graphs would change by changing that. But I think that's going to have to be something that will happen for next year, because I think that auditing process is going to require some time. Okay, thank you. So essentially, what's happening is we're using the same process for lack of a better word consistency at this time. Is that correct? Yeah, we're using the same designations that were used for the 2020 annual report. Okay. Can I get an explanation as to why Valcor doesn't track gunfire? Like, why does that have to be tracked outside of Valcor? I'd like a little bit more of an explanation there. Yeah, I can start and then I'll hand it over to Chief Mirad to add in his input. So my experience with Valcor is that it's a system that's designed for use by officers. And at this point now, almost the entire state is using Valcor. And every agency has its own needs for tracking what they want to track. And not all those needs are the same. And so if we want to track something like gunfire, that might not already be built into Valcor, maybe because it's a new request or for some other reason. And so that's why it's that that feature is just not in Valcor. And I don't know if there are plans to put it in. I'm not sure. But I'll kick it over to the Chief to add anything that he feels free. He needs to add. No, John, you did a terrific job. Valcor is a system that is designed for users in the field. It was not designed as a primarily data collection system. New York, for example, New York City has this system called OmniForm. It's incredibly laborious for officers to use. It is almost entirely about getting large-scale amounts of significant data out of every single complaint and every single arrest. And it's not about the officers being able to use it as a tool for their engagements in the field. Valcor is the opposite. Valcor is designed so that dispatch and officers can know what they're getting into, know the history of the people they're dealing with, have an idea. And then it also functions as a case management system whereby it's where all the information about an incident resides and is used to push that information to court for prosecution and for investigations. If it were designed only for data, it would probably do a lot of things differently and it probably would not be nearly as useful to the officers and from an operational standpoint. Why don't we track gunfire? Because gunfire is a crime to discharge a firearm in the city limits. That's an ordinance crime. It's not a crime in the state of Vermont. I can go to my parents' house in Underhill and shoot off as many rounds as I like and I'm not breaking the law. I may be annoying my neighbors, but I can do it. It's not a crime. It becomes a crime when it is done in a reckless manner and we have a crime for that, reckless endangerment. It also becomes a crime if it strikes somebody and we have a crime for that, aggravated assault or homicide or murder as the state's attorney frequently reminds me. The difference there is that we're not going to, in the same way that I would not track, I don't know, knife fighting separately from aggravated assault, I don't track gunfire from a Valkor's perspective. I track it, however, because it concerns me and I feel that it is a different kind of crime. We have started working to make certain that we are making every incident captured. For example, and I don't report on all of them. In the table that I presented a few minutes ago, there is an incident that is a person recklessly handling a firearm and shooting the round through the floor into the apartment below him or maybe it was through the ceiling into the apartment above him. I can't remember which direction it went in, but it was a reckless act, a criminal act. The person was not on scene when we arrived. We do have a description of the individual and information from the person who resides in the apartment, but that is, that's a crime, but it's a crime of reckless endangerment. It's not one that I reported to the media. It doesn't fit the standard of the kinds of gunfire incidents that we do report, but it is the kind that we track. I would not, however, track a suicide by firearm, which we did have one just recently. That is not a gunfire incident. I don't track incidents in which we are given evidence of gunfire being discharged for hunting purposes. Happens often in the new north end, people firing out over the lake, sometimes in the intervail. That is not going to be a gunfire incident. It has to be reasonable, excuse me, it has to be probable cause that the discharge occurred. We either have witnesses or victims or video or ballistics evidence recovered, and it has to be reasonable suspicion that it was discharged in a criminal manner. I want to move on to other things, but I'd like to revisit that at some point. Can I just ask, could we stick to questions for Johnno? It's a complex report, and I think, you know, if we could focus on that, we could get through that. I think if we keep interjecting other stuff, it's going to be hard to keep on track here, and then we could ask those other questions, but if we could just focus on the report, I think that would be helpful for Johnno. All right. Stephanie, I'll let you go ahead with your questions, and I might come back to some others. I just want to review my notes. Thank you. Johnno, first of all, thank you so much for the report and the quality of the report was really well done, so thank you. I have a lot of detailed comments that I'm happy to send you later. Let me say this up front. I think it's important for us as a city, a commission, and so forth, to present reports that are accessible to the public, and I have some thoughts for you on how we could do this and maintain all the detail, but perhaps just do a few things to make some of the data more accessible to those who aren't as used to looking at these graphs, and I'd be happy to just talk to you about that. Another comment I have is that every year, the reports differ, and I'd like to see if we could move towards a consistent format for a report, so it's similar in structure to last year, but there are some tables that are different, some graphs are approached differently, and so forth. It would be helpful, because I think what people want to understand is, first of all, one of the major concerns here is racial disparities. That was one of the issues, and so people would want to understand what the trends are, so if we have a consistent format for report year to year, it's a little easier to go back to the reports to assess that. I mean, you've done a nice job. Don't get me wrong with regard looking at the trend data, but I do think the format of the reports, if we could come with a consistent structure. Second of all, one of the issues, Jono, I appreciate your decision, and I want to ask just a thought here that 2020 isn't really comparable to 2021, and so in the beginning of the report, you're making comparisons, and I wonder if we could instead be comparing 2021 to 2019, which are both years in which COVID wasn't really impacting movement, and I was looking, for example, at the incidents, and if you compare the number of incidents from 2019 to 2021, there's actually a 40% decline in incidents, so I mean, you have the raw numbers here, but again, sometimes when you put this in the executive summary, that's where people will really be reading it, and that's where a comparison of that might be very useful. I mean, this is good news for us. Some of these issues that are coming up are certainly very worrisome, but I think we want to take what's positive that's going on as well, and I think the chief mentioned that some of that 40% is due to traffic stop and foot patrol reductions, and so if we remove those, because I think that's a useful comparison to remove those, I think the number is around 24%. That's really, really good news in just two years. So third is I want to ask if I could share my screen if that's possible. Okay, you cannot share your screen while others are sharing. Now let me see if I can try. Let's see if I can find it. I'm going to try this one. Yes. So, John, what's been happening with regard to traffic stop data is that increasingly there's a template that a lot of agencies are using, including Vermont State Police. So this is a way to aggregate a lot of the traffic stop data in just one single table, and I wonder if we could do something like that. So reasons for the stop, the outcome of the stop, all the data that you've included, but in a single table that would then help us. This one doesn't include percentages. I think the percentages are important, and I'm happy to show you the one that we've created that uses percentages, but I'm just wondering if we could use a summary table for arrests or use of force and traffic stops is already created, so that's possibly a template. You don't have to answer now just some thoughts to think about. And finally, I just want to, yeah, go ahead. So there was a table very much like this in the motion that was passed on January 26, 2021, and I felt, so I broke it up into, so each sort of orange heading here, I broke into its own table, so that I could talk about them separately, but I hear what you're saying about having them in one single location. Great. And finally, I noted that you didn't include census data in terms of traffic stops. And first of all, I want to say it's good news that the racial disparities in traffic stops have disappeared for one year, but we have to be careful. And John, you know this as well as I do, that one year is not a trend. And so my thought on this is that, especially because some of the numbers get very small, like on searches, for example, what would be useful to do is to do three-year, I'm going to just say this to John, I don't know if others will get it, but to do a three-year moving average, something like that, so you have large enough sample sizes each year to make credible assessments of what the trends are. But I also wanted to just mention the issue of using census data. I'd like you to report census data as well, and there are several reasons for that, and I'm happy to share them with you, and maybe I'll share them with the public as well. There are weaknesses with crash data, and every, as John knows, and anybody that does statistics knows, every indicator has its weaknesses. The unemployment rate is poorly measured, GDP is poorly measured. So just because something is not perfect doesn't mean it shouldn't be used. So with regard to census data, you're correct, it doesn't measure the driving population, but one of the things that we know is that, so it doesn't capture, for example, out of towners who are coming into Burlington, but we also know, for example, that people of color tend to drive less than white folks, and so even if we use the census estimates in some ways, it may be overestimating black drivers as compared to white drivers because of those driving behaviors. The other reason is because in most of the country, many municipalities and states continue to report census data, and racial shares have stopped using census data. I think it's just useful for us to be doing what others are doing so that we can compare ourselves to them, and that we also use the accident data. So we have, if you will, sort of a band within which we're measuring this. Census, the flaws I just mentioned, crash data is a problem as well because in many cases, not all crashes include a police officer, and so there is misrepresentation there, and I won't go into the detail about that, but I'd be happy to talk to you about it, Jono. So in any case, I think it would be useful to have both measures to say racial disparities or equalities are happening within a particular range, and so I'd just like to ask that you include that in the report as well. I have a number of other comments. Let me get my notes here. Sure. Yeah, while you're doing that, I'll just say one more thing about the census data, which was, yeah, I think it would make more sense to make comparisons to census data, especially if other municipalities or police departments are doing so, if the categories were the same. So I guess maybe what we could do is for this year's report, I was using perceived race, both as perceived by the officer who made the stop, and perceived race as perceived by the officer who submitted the crash report, and the categories for race for perceived race are for some reason different from the census categories. Maybe in the future it would make sense to, more sense to compare to census data by using a different race data in Valcor, which uses the same category as a census data. I'm sorry, that was a little thinking out loud, but. That's good. It's good. Valcor uses the race categories that are in the DMV database, which is what people are marked as for driving. And with regard to the idea that people of color drive less than others, there's no proof of that or even indication of that in Burlington. And in fact, the fact that the crash data is so much higher than the portion of people of color in the population suggests that they drive perhaps more, unless there is some insinuation that they drive worse, which I do not believe. So I'm sorry, a large number of crashes that go unreported. Crash data gets reported in Burlington and people do have to fill those out. I'd just like to keep the conversation with Jono right now, if I may. And also the actually the American community survey measures this and in fact for Burlington, the percentage of black Burlingtonians that use public transportation rather than cars is higher than whites. So that's the basis on which I'm saying that. But if I could just continue with Jono. So I noticed that, for example, in that there is some missing data in trapping stops in terms of race, and I think in some other categories as well. Now, is that have to do with commercial vehicles? Because I thought that Burlington had done a pretty good job of eliminating missing race data. So there, I'm trying to remember now this when I was auditing the traffic stops, what were some examples of missing race data. In some cases, the officer did not fill out the missing or did not fill out the race, the perceived race. And since we're going with perceived race for traffic stops, I couldn't just fill that out for me, because I might perceive that person's race to be different from the officer who made the stop. But there were also some cases where, for example, someone was stopped, I think, and the officer had to leave the stop for a more urgent call and then never recorded the race. I'm having trouble remembering the exact specific instances, but ultimately it's because the officer didn't fill that out and I couldn't change that. Okay. I think I'll just probably leave it at that. I have more details, but I think substantively, can I just ask you a question? I noticed that in the report it says petite larceny. Is that, is that the way it's reported or is that petty larceny? That's the way it's spelled in Valcor. So that was interesting. Okay. All right. I might have some other things, but I'll just let others ask some questions. And I'll come back to it. Commissioner Grant, did you have more questions? I can make some more comments, but if anyone else, since I've already spoken, I just want to make sure I'm not taking the opportunity from anyone else. You're fine, Commissioner. Okay. Thank you. Going back to petite larcenies versus grand larceny, I'm kind of curious. So not for this, so there's been a lot of talk about these type of larcenies. Can we get a specific definition just for the public? Because the terms are being used a lot recently, especially with regards to car thefts, where cars are actually physically stolen versus thefts where things are taken out of cars. Can you tell me, John, how you, how those are defined within the report? I wish that I could. So I was just using categories that are in Valcor, but I don't know the dollar amount that separates petite larceny from grand larceny. That's probably a question for the chief. Okay. Well, then we can handle that later. I noticed something that wasn't really referred in last year's report. Kind of going to Commissioner Seguino about the consistency of the reports where we're using the term crime. Is there a way to have an update where we take a look at that the last like five, six years as a trend, if we're going to use that term going forward? The term crime. Right. Yeah. The 2020 report did not actually include any information on crimes or arrests. Yeah. So that is new to this report. And yeah, I'm definitely open to terminology discussions. Okay. And can you tell me, did the trend continue where use of force is more likely to be used against Black people, even though they're less likely to be assaultive? So I did not compare, I did not look at trends with respect to that. Okay. So that category assaultive is, it's only recorded if force is used. So we only have information on that if force is used against the person. One thing that we did do in this year's report, and I can, I'll just share my screen. Bear with me. So in the appendix, one of the tables is here we go. So this is type of force by type of resistance specifically for Black subjects in 2021. So in order to get this to fit on one page, I had to use some acronyms. I apologize for that. But up here for the column headings, we have the types of resistance from deadly force, assaultive, active resistance, and so on. The key is in the caption here, oops, at the bottom. And then in the rows are labeled by the type of force that is used. And again, this is specifically for Black subjects. So if you want to focus on Black subjects of force who are assaultive, that would be in this A column. And then you can see what type of force was used. And it's worth noting that for the columns, each use of force was only categorized into one column. So these types of resistance are ranked, and I ranked each use of force by its like most extreme type of resistance. And so assaultive means that there might have been another type of resistance logged in Valcor, but assaultive was the most extreme. And so you can look at this assaultive column and see what type of force was used against people who use that type of resistance. And like I said, this is for Black subjects of force specifically. So you can compare this to the previous table on this previous page, which is the same thing, but for White subjects of force. So then you could look at White subjects of force who are categorized as being assaultive, and then what types of force were used against them. And you can compare these two tables. So I don't have trends over time, but I do have these tables that are specific to 2021. Okay, thank you. And then my final question that I'll ask, having to do with the percentage of when we're looking at the percentage of people that are Burlingtonians versus in other towns in Vermont, are we tracking out of state at all? Like what if someone's from out of state, like they're not a permanent resident here? Is that tracked at all or is it only tracked based on where they're staying when they're in Vermont? That is a good question. So my understanding is that for traffic stops, that residents information is going to come from the like DMV info. And so it's going to be what's on their driver's license. As for like residents, otherwise that's sort of the best knowledge of people at the police department where that person resides. And so we do have information about where they reside in Valcor. And I just threw people who are from any state other than Iran into this not Vermont category. Did that actually answer your question? Yeah, there was an amount, I want to say it was 800 something close to 900 where there was no address at all. Is that correct? Yeah, that's absolutely right. That's in the last line of this table. 888 had no address listed in Valcor. Had no address listed in Valcor. Okay. Thank you. Yeah. And I do want to just make one more point, which is that there is information on Valcor for people who don't have permanent housing. And the there is information about where they spend most of their nights. So this some of these missing people for sure are people who don't have housing, but a lot of people who don't have housing have been categorized by sort of which town they spend most of their nights. May I ask another question? This is on behalf of Commissioner Hart. And I'm not, I think you were participating last year, John, when this issue came up. So let me just contextualize it by saying that, you know, one of the issues, one of the concerns around these reports are racial disparities that course, much broader than that, but that is a focus. And where we are seeing is that there's been some progress in traffic stops, although I'll have a caveat to that, but I'll leave that aside. But we continue to see it in use of force. And I think the concern for many of us is to hone down to try to we see that that blacks are roughly 35% of those on whom force is used. And I think we want to hone down what portion of that is justified and what portion of that is due to racial bias. I think it would be it would be naive of us as a community to assume that all of that is justified, that that would make us very different than the rest of the country. And I think we have to be vigilant. And so one of Sherene's Commissioner Hart's questions had to do with this issue of the type of force used by race. Let me read her question to you and clarify it if I can, if it's not clear. She said that she was interested in knowing more about the type of force used by race. And in particular, she wanted to understand what the data is on those instances where an officer is required to use a firearm. So for example, when serving a warrant, officers are required to use a firearm. So it's very similar to what we try to do with the traffic stop. We're trying to focus on discretionary traffic stops compared to externally generated, for example, right. So here I think that Commissioner Hart's question is, can we separate out those uses of force like pointing gun that are non discretionary, isolating those that are discretionary and look at racial disparities within that. Did that, did that come out okay? Yeah, yeah, I think that's a great question. I don't think that there's, you know, unfortunately, I'm subject to sort of what fields and checkboxes are available in Belcourt. And I don't know that there is a way to, with high fidelity, exclude incidents where using like drawing a firearm is required by policy. There are probably imperfect ways of doing that. For example, I know that search warrants are more likely to have a firearm drawn by that's required. And so it could be possible to exclude those incidents like search warrants. So I guess that's a long way of saying that it might be possible, but it might be a little messy. Yeah, I guess I would just say for future reference, you know, that's one of our concerns and maybe to keep that in mind. So that might be a sub analysis that you do understanding that the data are imperfect, but helping us really separate out, you know, really trying to hone in on what may be bias related racial disparities and use of force. I think that's the end of my sort of substantive questions and I'll be in touch. And what we plan on doing, Jono, is to aggregate any and all of the questions from commissioners or requests and put those in a document to you that's easy to follow rather than you having to remember what we're saying right now. Okay, thank you. Thanks so much. This was really great work. Yeah, thank you so much. Any further questions for Jono while we have him here? Not seeing or hearing any. Jono, thank you very much for that report. Well detailed and well written out. And I know we very much appreciate it. I believe we, as a commission, are going to like, we're going to gather some thoughts up. I'll get them in in a few later on in the future. So yeah, we'll get to see you shortly. And again, thank you very much for this. Really appreciate it. Thank you all so much for having me. Thanks. Awesome. All right. I guess if there's any questions over a data report that's specific for the chief now would be an appropriate time to ask those questions. I think it might be, you know, maybe useful after we as we've discussed to digest the report and maybe at our next meeting have some discussion about what the report is telling us and have a conversation with the chief about that. It's a lot to digest all at once. So maybe waiting with help and processing it. Sounds like an excellent idea. I like that. All right then. Moving on to agenda items 6.02 is the downtown public safety plan presentation. And without it gives a floor back to you. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I'll share my screen again. So this is our revision of the priority response plan. One of the ways that we are addressing this decrease in staffing and officer headcount, even with these increases in certain other capacities is by changing our priority response plan. One thing that has not changed is our rankings. The idea of priority one versus priority two versus priority three has not been altered. What has been altered is that a number of priority threes have been changed to be either CSO, meaning that a CSO will respond or ONL, which means they are online reporting only. And this is designed to maximize the number of officers who are available at any given time. It may actually decrease the frequency with which we go into priority, excuse me, into the stacking plan. It may increase the frequency with which we go into stacking. I'm not sure how that's going to shake out yet. A number of these are instances in which the first response will be a CSO. If the event changes in some way or if the CSO gets there and says this is not something that I can handle, then it will become an officer response. That's something that does happen with car crashes. CSOs can take non-investigatory, non-injury crashes. But if they get to the scene and it turns out that one of the vehicles has had an airbag deploy, for example, or the scope of the damage is going to be large enough to require a different kind of form than the CSOs are allowed to fill out, a Ferrari accidentally backed into a tree and just dented its bumper a tiny bit. And that's probably going to have to be an officer doing the response because the damage money is going to go above the capacity of a CSO to fill out. But for the most part, we send CSOs to non-investigatory, non-injury crashes. The other big change is that our Detective Services Bureau will handle all untimely deaths that happen during our day hours when the detectives are on. And that can free up a lot of time. Untimely deaths, even when they are not suspicious, can occupy as many as a couple of hours while officers wait for a medical examiner to arrive. They wait for a funeral home to come and claim the body. Being able to give that off so that officers can continue to respond to calls for service is an important way of maximizing the road officer's availability. This is our staffing for the summer. There's historical staffing on the left-hand side, and there is summer shifts on our expected summer shifts on the right. One thing that has changed is that we have eight CSOs now, although as I said we're actually down to seven, but nominally we have two CSOs per shift on the day shift and on the evening shift. What this shows, by the way, is because of the way our shifts work, they overlap, and we have two sides to each shift. The historical shift graphic, we actually had twice as many officers available as that depicts. And the right-side summer shift graphic for this coming summer 2022, we have twice as many available as that depicts. This is only depicting one side of the shift, but there's a huge difference in capacity. When we have five officers on a midnight shift, then a shooting that happened in Central, excuse me, in City Hall Park, for example, we had three people respond to that, a sergeant and two police officers. We had an injured party who had to be shepherded to the hospital. We had a witness who had to be maintained and both interviewed, but also not allowed to leave. We had a scene that had to be controlled, that ultimately ended up being the scope of almost the end. So had to be taped off. Controlling a scene of that size with three officers is an impossible task, and although we were able to do it in this particular instance, we had a help from a UVM police officer. Great thanks to our colleagues at UVM. The fact of the matter is that if that had been a busier scene, if there had been more people present, if there had been upset people present because of the fact that somebody is shot, if there had been active people who were still violent or still needed to be controlled, we would have been in a very different kind of situation with the resources that we have. Again, as I said, we have a difficulty here, which is that we know when these incidents occur with regard to time of day, and they're frequently on the midnight shifts or the end of the evening shift. We also know that we don't know when they occur with regard to day of month or day of week a little bit more. They do hover around the weekends, but we can't staff based on these kinds of incidents that are so rare. That's why you staff adequately, and adequate staffing is not about your minimum needs on slow nights. Your adequate staffing is about what happens when a reasonable but very possible kind of incident is going to happen, and what do you need to address that? We don't have that kind of staffing right now, so we are making do with what we've got, and a way to accomplish that is a new deployment plan for the downtown. This is our old deployment plan, a community policing-based plan. It shows eight officers associated with the city and divided into areas. One officer in A area, which is the new north end, one officer in the south end, two officers in the old north end, two officers in the hill section, two officers in the downtown, and in addition, each day shift would have had a CSO assigned. The evening shifts would not. This is strong community policing. Officers stay in these shifts in these neighborhoods for four months at a time. They get to know the neighborhood, they get to know the people and the problem and the potential of that neighborhood. It's the essence of community policing. Since this is a picture of where our resources are, now you know that we're down 50% with regard to our patrol resources. The whole department is about 40% down, a little bit less. The patrol resources are down 50% or more from their norms. This circle shows where 50% of our incidents occurred from 2017 through 2021. It's the core of the city. It's not surprising to us. D area has always been an area where there are significant numbers of calls for service. How we will be deploying is this. When we have four officers available, and we don't always, that's what we have when everybody's in on a shift is four. Anybody goes out for sickness, for training, because they need to take their kid to the dentist, and we are down to three. But when we have four, we will be putting two officers and two CSOs into the new city center area, or CCA, and they won't be proactively patrolling outside that CCA, although they will respond to calls for service. There are two things that dictate this plan. One is, do we have four officers on a shift on any given day? And two is, what is the call volume? What is the volume of calls for service? We will put one officer on Rover North and one officer on Rover South. If there are heavy volumes of calls, then these officers won't be in the CCA. They'll be running to calls back and forth and back and forth wherever those calls are coming from. But if call volume is steady but normal, and if we have all four officers, then two officers and two CSOs will focus on the downtown area, the city center area, or CCA. And the CCA includes the marketplace and City Hall Park and the public library, and the two churches on Bewell Street and the downtown transit center. There's also King Street, there's the waterfront, there's Battery Park, there's North Street, there's the Western Hill section, the lower areas around Bewell, around Hickok and Isham, and then there's Roosevelt Park. And these are the areas where we're going to be asking these officers and community service officers to focus their efforts with regard to presence, with regard to disorder control, and with regard to proactive response when they are able to manage that proactive response. Disorder and decency. There has been too much disorder in downtown. The mayor spoke about it when he announced this plan on this past week, and we are looking to make certain that we are expecting much of each other, of every resident. All of our neighbors expect these kinds of proper behaviors of shared usage of our public space. When you use public space in a way that prevents others from using it, you are not using it in a way that is fair, and often you are not using it in a way that is lawful. So we are going to be working on these, we've had discussions with the city attorney's office, a refresher for various kinds of trespass and ordinances that are relevant to City Hall, to other parks, and to the marketplace. There are many partners involved in this, many. We have issues with, I mean, excuse me, we have partners at the Burlington City Arts at the Howard Center with regard to street outreach. We have the Church Street Marketplace and the businesses that are parts of that. We have the parks and recreation. They will have, by the way, new positions, parks rangers, urban park rangers. Then there are also the likelihood of private security like Chocolate Thunder and others who were able to help last summer and we hope will help this summer. We will have four beach and parkers. We've hired four beach and parkers. They'll be starting at the beginning of June. We do have those CSOs. You see two of our great CSOs in that upper right-hand corner, Photo, Dom, and Akeem, really great new employees. We still have officers, of course. These are the tiers of response. I mentioned this in a meeting, a separate meeting with members of the Police Commission, Commissioner Comerford, Commissioner Hart, and talked about these tiers and the ways in which to think about how these interact. I was asked to create this graphic by Commissioner Comerford. The idea of these tiers of response are that these are sort of analogized to our department tiers of response. Patrol is the key. Patrol does great work with regard to both answering calls for service and when it has the capacity, proactive engagement that can be preventive. Detectives take calls that have exceeded the time ability of patrol and need additional resources or skill sets or training and go longer. We're going to have more involved investigations. Finally, we have an emergency response unit that works with special equipment like our emergency response vehicle to tackle actual ongoing crises, a big event, barricaded persons, for example, active shooters, or high-risk warrants. Analogized to that is street outreach, similar to patrol, our CSLs in-house and able to do work like detectives, case management, follow through on incidents. Then we're building a crisis response, which is actually the next item on tonight's agenda. I'm sorry, it's not the next, it's the second to next item with regard to how that is going and the process there. I think that it's what's ahead. We have an immediate staffing issue and we are looking into potential options for that. That includes things that I don't recommend like pulling from detectives because then we don't have the ability to keep up with the crimes that are happening, burglaries, patterns, these shootings and gunfire incidents. Our dispatch is critically staffed right now as well. They have been given a retention memorandum of understanding from the city that the city council approved. 12-hour shifts is a possibility. Moving to those, they are not a healthy or sustainable model, but they can be used when necessary in order to deal with this unacceptable reduction in force. The other piece however is that it carries with it risks. There are diminished ability to respond to calls for service. There's exhaustion that carries risks such as bad decisions and tragic mistakes, but the looming problem is that we desperately need to rebuild. We are desperately understaffed and that rebuilding is going to require resources. It's going to require a fair contract for these officers. It's going to require a rebuilding plan. For dispatch, what is looming is regionalization and the movement of dispatch to a regionalized plan that is dispatch shared by a number of different municipalities including Colchester, South Burlington, Burlington and others, but we don't have a regionalization for our police force. The Vermont State Police will not come in and deal with our overnights. They are already dealing with other municipalities that are understaffed, Shelburne being an example. No one else is coming and we have to rebuild this police department because we are not staffed to deal with what we are facing. I think that's it. This is the one I always include. I always include this as an effort to if anybody clicks on these when they go visit the transparency site, I want them to see what we are offering right now. Again, we're hopeful to make a strong contract that increases this, makes this more lucrative, makes it more than competitive with our peers, makes it something that we have people choose us over our regional peers. To come here not only for the great things that we've been doing for a very long time, this has been a cutting edge community policing agency for a very long time. We want them to be able to come to make certain that they can make a life for themselves, a fair life that is secure and is contributory. I think that's it. Thank you for that, Chief. I'm pretty sure the floor is open for any questions to the Chief with regards to the public safety plan. I just have a comment not to really go into right now, but just something to really think about in terms of the way that we communicate with our community. So to your point about being understaffed, we still don't have communication, at least that I'm seeing, that really talks to our community to let them know the things that they can do to help prevent certain crimes because certain crimes, the presence, you know, we could increase the number of officers on the street by 100 tomorrow and we're still going to have cars broken into. We're still going to have bikes stolen. We're still going to have certain crimes of opportunity, which increase a lot during the summer because of the tendency of people to leave windows open, to cool their homes if they don't use air conditioners or have air conditioners, and maybe they leave the house, but they've left the windows open or they leave doors unlocked, you know, things like that. We don't talk to the community enough about what members of the community can do to lower their risk for crimes of opportunity. As an example, I was watching part of a statement that the South Burlington Chief, Chief Burke, gave and he was talking in particular because they too are seeing this big increase in stolen cars, where as opposed to someone just rifling through a car, yes, annoying, yes, frustrating, people get angry, they get upset, but it's a very different thing to have your car stolen. That is a life-altering event if you have your vehicle stolen and you work somewhere where public transportation is inconvenient or possibly not accessible. I know for myself personally, I recently looked into public transportation where I'm now working in Essex and they don't go out far enough and I could go to the last stop, but if I try to walk there's this whole section which I'm willing to walk on a good day, but it's a whole section where there's no sidewalk and the traffic's pretty quick. So when a car is actually stolen, that really is, I think anyone, if you talk about getting your car rifled through versus actually stolen, we all know what we would prefer. Wouldn't like either one, but we all know what we would prefer. So when he talked to the community, he was saying, look, we're out here doing the hard part, we're trying to figure out who's doing this, we're trying to get them into custody, but we've got cars out here that have keys left in them, that are being unlocked, and please be more vigilant. And I think that it is, of course, no one's fault if they're a victim of crime, but we have to be more conscious about the things that we can do to help the police department because there are certain crimes the police department really can't prevent. And that's just a reality of the situation because you can't have an officer next to every open window, unlocked car door, unlocked home. You just can't. So I think that's something that we need to think about when we're doing these type of presentations. What can the community do? There's just not that level of communication, and it's a problem, and it's been that way for some time. So I'd like the department to think about that. Thank you very much. Thank you for that. Any further questions for the chief right now? As regards to public safety plans, not seeing or hearing any with that. Chief, thank you for that presentation. Appreciate it. And moving on to agenda item 7.01, which is policy update. And seeing how two of the pressures that are working on one of the things I'm not present for this meeting. We can't get an update on DD 13.02 and 13.03. I wanted to give an update. I said last meeting I would identify a policy to look into and start working on. And that has been DD 33, which is two of our operations. That was last updated in 2013. And there's a lot of outdated language in that. So moving forward, I am going to reach out to some local partners and kind of figure out the best way. I think basically, see what best operations, best standard procedures are. And then move forward with that. And I'll reach out to the chief with regards to that as well too. And I think, I think Stephanie and Kevin might have been working on something, but I'm not sure. Sorry, I won't speak for you. Yeah, we have been stalled because of our work schedules to work on the complaint policy. And actually Commissioner Gavash, I wonder if you could join us in working on revising the complaint policy. And maybe that would expedite things a bit to do that. There were some recommendations just for the public that's watching, there were some recommendations with regard to collecting demographic data, making complaints more accessible, providing self-addressed stamped envelopes, for example, and some other things. So some really just sort of basic things to make the complaint process more accessible and then the more substantive issues that CNA has requested that we look at as well. So I'm hopeful that this month we will be able, the month of June will actually be able to make significant progress. That's good. I think I need to help. All right, then. Let's just any further updates. We'll move on to 7.02, which is the crisis intervention RFP update. And I guess back to you, John, I'm not sure there's any update on this at all right now. Not much of an update. We had two respondents to that RFP. One of them was decidedly stronger than the other. We are, but however it was a, we're working through the possibility of that response. We are, I'm having a meeting tomorrow with agents at the state level to determine whether or not perhaps there is additional funding available for the program, which would make the bids more viable. And that's really where we are right now. All right, I appreciate that. Do you know a timeline? I'm sorry. Chief, do you know a timeline? No, no, I would not, but I would not anticipate that this is something that is going to be fully active before the end of the summer. Awesome. Thank you for that update. Moving on to the agenda out of 8.01, which is the use of course, internet reports. This was posted to the board docs a couple of days ago. I hope people had time to review it. If I could make a request, I would appreciate seeing BWC footage for incident number three on the report. And I don't know if there's any others that people want to see, but that was one that stuck out to me. That was the one that stuck out to me as well, too. I would agree with that one. I also would like to see number 16. And wasn't another individual affected or was that in a previous use and force report? This month only had 12 incidences, so if it was 16, that must have been a different one. And I don't know which month that would have been. Okay, maybe I was looking at an older one. Because the one on board docs. Because the one posted currently for this meeting on board docs is for use of force report April 2022. I think this one might have been from a previous one, but I would like to look at it going back. I have the incident number. Can you give it to me? Yes, 22BU002673. And I'm interested in the footage with the individual who it wasn't misidentification, but I'm interested in seeing that interaction as well. Moving on to agenda item 9.01, commendations that have been received for the month of April 2022. Was that a gift of floor to Shannon? Sorry, I'm just really dark in here now, I guess. I have two here to share. A gentleman that was formerly houseless has had years and years of interactions with the department and has 11 months of sobriety. And he specifically stated in his graduation application that the positive feedback that he received from BPD was especially helpful and helped him notice that he needed to change. He spoke specifically of an officer talking to him about how well he was doing and stated that that meant a lot to him. So he was extremely appreciative of them touching base with him. And then the next one is accommodation from the 158th Security Forces Squadron of the Air Guard, praising some of our sergeant, senior officer in the corporal and two corporals for helping assist and provide active shooter training. Awesome. Thank you, Shannon. Appreciate that. Up next is Commissioner Updates and Comments since the time of the meeting where commissioners can voice any comments, concerns that were not on the agenda for the public or for us. Not seeing or hearing it. Sorry. It's me again. I'm going to try and keep this as brief as possible because I know it's been a long meeting and I know we've all worked today. And so language and tone are important. And we have to be very careful about how we talk about certain things so that we don't do unintentional harm to citizens in our community. And I would like to expand on that further, but I'm going to leave it at that right now. I think that we've had a number of issues and communications with the community that at times, quite frankly, have been careless and hurtful. And I know from my interactions with members of the community that I'm not the only one who feels this way. Thank you. Thank you for that, Mila. Any other commissioners or comments or updates right now? I'm not seeing or hearing any. The next item is next meeting agenda items. Other than policy updates, nothing is jumping out on me right now. Obviously that will change the next couple of days as we figure out the agenda for next month, but I don't have anything jumping out on me right now, other than working on policy updates. Anyone else wants to throw something in the air for us to think about? Could we summarize all the policy updates that we're required to touch from the CNA report and then possibly for the next meeting, maybe firm up a schedule? I feel like we're a little bit behind in terms of where we said some of those policy reviews would, when they would be completed with regards to the ones that need to be looked at by the commission. Thank you. No problem. With that, speaking of parts of that, I'm not aware that the CNA report has come out yet. Still waiting on that to be completed by the Public Safety Committee. If it has come out yet, then I'm terribly sorry that I've completely missed it, but I don't believe it's come out yet. I thought that we could proceed with what had been had to the police commission. Maybe we should touch base with Counsel Paul. Yeah. We'll do that. I'll reach out to you and we'll take care of that. Okay, thank you. Yeah, not a problem. Next item is motion to adjourn, but I have one thing I just got to bring up. Will we have a quorum for tomorrow night? I know Kevin's not available. You all are not here and I'm not actually unavailable tomorrow night as well too. So I'm curious if we should do, sorry, Steffi. Yeah, that's a good question because Commissioner Comerford is teaching for the next few weeks and she may not be available tomorrow night. So I guess we should check to see if she's not available. We don't have a quorum. Maybe we should just reschedule the meeting possibly for next Tuesday to review the complaints and executive session. I'm happy with that. That way Commissioner Garrison could be there as well and Commissioner Hart. That's on the middle to you. Next Tuesday is the BPD's budget presentation to the city council. I will not be available. What about next Monday? Next Monday is Memorial Day. That's not going to work then. I have to push it to another week. All right then, at the end of this meeting, I'm just going to send a quick email out to everybody here and we'll try to figure out a date so we can take care of that. That's one of the few times we can all email each other outside of MBA. All right then. I can't think of anything else right now. With that, I would motion to adjourn the meeting. Second. Second advice. All the favoritism. Can you say hi? Hi. All right. That passed unanimously. Let's see. The next regular schedule monthly meeting will be the 4th Tuesday of June, which is the 28th. Normally, it's time for 6 o'clock, but I might amend that to 6, 10 or 6 o'clock because I know Milo gets done working at 6 o'clock and we don't want you sitting in your office at 6 for the entire year of the meeting. Then I'll go home afterwards. We'll try to figure out something so we can make everybody join me properly. With that, we adjourn. Everybody have a great night. Thanks for seeing you all and we'll see you on the 28th of June. Have a great night.