 I think it just is looking to be... Anything? I thought you told my attention. I thought you were trying to get my attention. That would be an obvious meaning to it. I'm disappointed. Check, check, check, check, check, check. Yeah? Got that one? Sorry. What do you think the chances are, neither one of us will knock our mics over to them? See if we can get them... I wouldn't bet against it. I'll put it that way. I think they... Look, they blocked you from doing that. Hey, how are you? Oh, this is awesome. If anything has a place, I have... That's fantastic. Hey, thanks. Good evening. Okay, I'll go grab some. All right. Yep. I mean, just like this big? It's a great photo. Yeah, it is. Yeah, I'll put one up on the... It's silly in here. Anybody else? You're cold. That's a high furnace. Hey, Bob. How you doing? Doing well. Exciting going on. All the way this... Oh, because we have a presentation. Really? The sun is over. It was in London, but he has... Barcelona? No, it was about... It was about the southwest of Madrid. Yeah. Old, a lot of old women. It's better than worse than ever. Sorry, guys. Sorry. Very rude. Good, Jim? Okay. Yep. Sorry, we're called to order the police department commission meeting for April 17th, 6 p.m. Are there any additions or modifications to the amended agenda? Okay. I think we officially just do meetings. So, do we have a motion to approve the amended agenda? Second? Second. Okay, all in favor? Aye. Anyone opposed? Okay, great. We have public forum. Is anyone here for public forum? Okay, we are halfway done with the agenda. So, chief's report, please. We're going to have a community barbeque at... Do you have the poster here? We saw one of the posters around. Yeah, I have. Right there. Yep. These are really long. May 16th, can I ask the person who should take the credit for doing a lot of the work issue this aspect of the report? Yes. Things are looking good. It's at Pomeroy and North Street, so we're going to do a bit of a block party, but also have the parts available of food from Al's French fries as he's done in the last several years. He's been a huge supporter, as well as other sushi rolls, hopefully some dumplings, and then music lined up and the Facebook page, please share. I may. Who knows? Chief Fright, do you want to talk about a recent passing in the department? Two or three days ago, right? Yeah. So, his services were Friday in Shelburne, and the last time a full service package was going to happen. That's right. I guess that's the extent of the chief support. I know we wanted to talk about car stop, race data. I guess I will say one thing. I feel like I've introduced everybody. I know you met Kayla, Donahue, last month. Have you been here to one of these meetings yet? Okay, great. So, Nancy Stetson is the new, for shorthand, Eric Fowler. Some of you may remember Eric. The department's full-time crime and data analyst. Nancy comes from... Barbara, why don't you please go ahead and tell us a little bit about yourself. I came most recently from UC Berkeley. I have a master's in public policy there, but I was born and raised here in Vermont, down in Madison County. That's it. So, welcome aboard. One of the reasons why we waited a little bit to bring Nancy on board is because she's... You have two kids, right? Yeah. But a new mom as well. One of the kids is... How old now? She's five months. Five months? Yeah. So, a lot going on. And Nancy does a great job of balancing it and bringing a lot of value to our work. So, welcome aboard. Congratulations on both fronts. And welcome. Thank you. Glad you're here. So, if you look at it, we have a great team of analysts, and that's one of the reasons they're here tonight. We'll be talking about some of our data. We have Nancy, Kayla Donahue, who we divide with the opioid alliance. She does opioid-related analyses and helps out with analyses in general. And of course, you know, Eric Cradoville, who is our crime and data analyst. When we approved an education leave, he was one of the first folks to take advantage of it, and now he's paying his penance, so to speak. Also, Lieutenant Mike Warren, I don't know if you know Mike, Mike was the detective bureau lieutenant for a while, and now he's working under Chief Wright as the new administrative lieutenant. I don't know if you want to introduce yourself there, but you've been... Yeah, Mike Warren? Yeah, there it is. Thank you all for your service. Thanks. I don't know if you want to go to the next agenda item. I don't have much more, but we have an update. So, no one minds. One of the things Christine asked to have on the agenda was the most recent car stop race data from Stephanie Seguino's 2014-2015 report. I thought it's good to talk about that. It certainly got a lot of coverage in the news. It looked at statewide car stop data from 13 and 14. So we can discuss that as well. There were some interesting findings in there, but I thought as long as we're going to be discussing that, it would be helpful to discuss as the Burlington Police Commission the Burlington Police Department data from 2016 and 2017. So what we have now is our data all the way up to the end of 2017, which is four months ago. It's all been analyzed. We can compare it to the statewide trends. We can compare it historically to our trends. We put together a report about it. And if you don't mind, that actually I think we'll walk through it, but the analysts put a lot of work into this. You have the written product in front of you. We can go through it and then of course take questions during or after and see where it goes. So this is an assessment of equity in policing. Next slide, please. So one of the things that we realize is that there's disparate outcomes in several facets of motor vehicle enforcement. Some of them have explanations that we can discuss. Others, the explanations are slower in coming. But one of the things we did kind of, you know, we're working on these all along. But since I got here, I know I took ownership of trying to do a lot of them myself and our administration. Hey guys, I don't know if you want to set up. So maybe we could just stall for a little bit while the news, the new sets up this on. Good. All right, thanks. All right. So there are some things we did to help ensure that we have more equity unless disparity in the outcomes of our traffic enforcement. The first thing we did is we gave cops enhanced training and interdiction techniques. So that is if cops are pulling a car over at the side of the road and they're making assessments about the level of suspicion that they have towards a driver, the vehicle or passengers, that it's based on good investigative techniques. It's based on knowledge of how to ask questions and interview people. It's based on proper law so that the searches are more likely to be fruitful when they do conduct them. The second thing is we've had really frank conversations about the explanations and causes and remedies of implicit bias. So one of the things we did is number one, just in-house talk about implicit bias. But as you also know, as of recently, we had Dr. Bryant Marks come to give every Burlington employee plus community members, plus other officers outside the department training and identifying and remedying implicit bias. That was sort of like the capstone of conversations that we were having over the course of the last at least two years at road calls where we're talking about the fact that bias exists in everyone, not just the police, but people in society in various ways. But it's acutely felt in policing because police have bias plus power and that has implications when people act based on their implicit biases. We talked to cops about the magnitude of these disparities, that like a 20% spread in the outcomes of searches has implications that many people find troubling and that are in fact difficult to explain if you look at them on their face. We looked at the stress that motorists are under when you stop them, no matter who they are. We talked about the perception that motorists of color have of the police, that it's historical, as well as local based here. We also did something which about a year and a half ago, we gave officers access to the outcomes of their own stops and we allowed them to compare those outcomes to their peers anonymously. So you could see as a driver, it's about a year and a half ago, as I'm sorry, you could see as an officer who you're stopping, the race of who you're stopping, the outcomes by race of who you're stopping and then see how that compared to your peers. So you understand the magnitude of this but you also understand your performance and we also talked about implicit bias. So those are four discrete interventions that we did in order to try to enhance equity of the Brownington Police Department. Can I ask a question or should I wait? No, no, please, go ahead. Well, I mean, when you're describing that, I'm just wondering if there's a piece of that that is like supervision too or are people just monitoring it on their own? No, I mean the probably, so when officers do car stops, they do them predominantly by themselves, they say initiate the stop by themselves, they have solo cars and so one of the, and most car stops go on unsupervised, right? Unless you're going to arrest somebody or a significant incident happens, you want to take the car back for a search warrant. It's a transaction that happens throughout American police with minimal supervision. So I know you're maybe asking a slightly different question. Well, I mean, I'm saying when somebody's reviewing their data, when you were just describing, like they can compare it to other officers' data unanimously or whatever. Anonymously, yeah, yeah. I think that makes sense. Right. Yeah, anonymously. But I'm just wondering if there's a piece that Well, it's hard, I mean, it comes from myself and Chief Burke, right? And it comes from the headquarters section. What we don't, what's difficult to do is to have a sergeant, to tell a sergeant, like sergeants are good at finding explicit bias, right? Or reacting to the way an officer behaves around other people. But to say there's a spread and the outcomes of who you're giving tickets to and who you're giving warnings to, I want a sergeant to be on top of that. You can see what I'm saying, it's hard to understand what the sergeant would say without knowing more. Because, well, you'll see later on in the presentation, suspended licenses have a huge effect on the outcome of a stop. And so, you know, I guess what you're asking is, does a sergeant sit down and have a conversation with an officer about a disparity in race or does a lieutenant do that? The answer is no. I just think it's a really difficult conversation that those supervisors don't know necessarily how to have in a really constructive way. But I know that, like, we've been giving it a lot of thought, meaning me, Chief Wright, Chief Burke, now more so, you know, Lieutenant Warren and Lieutenant Lawson. So that's the level at which it's happening, at the command level. Yeah, and I think, I mean, I also, and you and I could maybe talk about this more. I've been involved in a lot of this stuff even recently with the panel. We're hoping that, I actually resigned, but I'm hoping that there will be some more models in, like, systemic ways to integrate supervision into the reviewing of data. And I think the Vermont State Police, I've heard maybe that they're doing some of that where, I mean, and whatever the supervision it was, whether it was a sergeant sitting down with somebody, or I just feel like it's information that should be used that way. Right. No, I see what you're saying, and I guess to be candid, it's a very, very difficult conversation for supervisors to have. You know, you don't have training in these issues of equity and public administration or the comfort level to really talk frankly about them. I think until you've been doing this a while and rise to the ranks, it's like we select chiefs based on their ability to engage with these issues, but it's, we'd have to develop a curriculum around it and really create a comfort level. And so we don't have that now. And Chief Burke was really good about sharing that at our CALEO meeting, the last meeting that he was at. He was really candid and shared his own process of reviewing it and trying to process what was going on. So. No, no, so it's a good point. I mean, ideally we would be able to address it at every level of supervision, but we're not there yet. Want to go to the next slide? Thanks, Eric. So these are measures of discrimination, a possible bias. Are people of color more likely to be stopped in the first place? Are they more likely to be ticketed rather than worn? Are they more likely to be searched? And then we didn't use the term gold standard. It was one of the things that Professor Seguino used, but the gold standard is not the search per se, but the hit rate, which is the likelihood of finding contraband given a search. So you could argue that probable cause is probable cause, and you're always entitled to act on probable cause. But if you're acting on probable cause and it's not bearing fruit or not being successful as often with drivers of color as white drivers, then what was imputing that cause in the first place, right? The worry is that blackness or brownness imputes a level of criminal suspicion in and of itself that's unwarranted in cops. It's a definition of profiling. The differences in the hit rate are often taken as evidence of at least implicit bias. And one of the things that Professor Seguino said in VPR is to VPR is when you find consistently the drivers of color are more likely to be searched but less likely to be found with contraband, often an inference is made that this is the result of some kind of bias, implicit or explicit bias. And I think this is really compelling. When you look at the research around car stops and race data, this is a standard that people go to as one of the most telling standards of bias. And it's something that we personally, as well as Professor Seguino, when she's come here to talk to our cops as well as Chief Burke, have said to our officers and contended with as an indication of bias. So next slide please. So these are the data from 2012 onward. Are black drivers less likely to gather a stop with only a warning? The gold standard for all drivers is to get a warning when they get stopped, right? We all hope for it. And so the question is, you know, you go phew, to what extent are black drivers likely to get a warning versus white drivers? When you look at the straight data, you can see that black drivers are the lighter line, white drivers are the darker line. You can see that white drivers across the years are more likely to get a warning. Black drivers are less likely to get a warning, they're likely to get a ticket. That's a fact, right? And I know Stephanie pointed this out. This is our data and it prevails over five years. There's a point, though, something I think that's important to control for, that if we're looking for justice and equity in Vermont, we have to contend with. And that's license violations. So next slide, please. This is the idea. If you have a suspended license, or no license at all, but especially a suspended license, it's a little tiny. The reason why is because you have a suspension because you fail to answer prior tickets. If you have a warrant, if you have no license, you shouldn't be on the road in the first place. So the thought and jurisprudence, and I know there's a lot of attorneys here and people with a legal background, is not declining or less serious consequences to escalating behavior. It's the same or greater consequences to escalating behavior. So if you get a ticket and don't answer, get a ticket and don't answer, the answer is not, we know you don't answer tickets, so now we're just going to let you go. You're getting another ticket. Or if it's a criminal suspension, you're getting an arrest. So when you factor out suspensions, and you factor out not having a license, just those two things, the warning rates collapse. Some years black drivers are worn more often than whites. Some years there's a three percentage point difference, and some years they're equal. Over the course of the years from 2012 to 2017, black drivers and white drivers are statistically equally likely to get a warning. That's if you control for license violations. So it's an important caveat. But when you look at license violations, cops give tickets for license violations something like 96% of the time. We talk later on in the report about there are social and racial justice implications of why people end up with suspended licenses. But if you are a driver, so the bottom line is if you're a Vermont driver or if you're driving in Vermont and you get pulled over and your license is not suspended, if you have a driver's license and it's not a suspended license, the chance of you getting a warning or a ticket year to year is equal whether you're black or white. But there's a whole other can of worms to open up with social justice and equity in why people have suspended licenses. And we'll discuss that. And especially when you think about the overall demographics of Vermont, there's not even a lot of us here. So it kind of adds like a layer. Well, this is a percent thing though, so it's a rate, so it's not the overall number, but the point, so no, but you're right nonetheless. I mean, and if we already know that there are disparities in traffic stops over the past decades, as long as I've been looking at it, that adds to the explanation about why people have suspended licenses. Sure, no, no, that's right. Chief, a question. It's black and white. Where are in these numbers, you know, Latinos, Asians? One of the reasons why we concentrated on black and white, and it's a great question, because there are many races and many colors and many shades of racial identity, is that the numbers for Hispanic and Asian are so tiny, that it's sort of not, when it comes to suspensions, it's not responsible to draw statistical conclusions about it. We're talking about... Some of the information over previous years really showed that some of those groups were being overlooked in terms of the hit, you know... Well, you can look at, on the back of the report, there's the actual numbers for the last three years. So, we're not trying to suppress those numbers to say that they don't exist or they're not important. Yeah. It's just looking at the two most predominant numbers. I mean, if you look at... There were, in 2017, for example, just to get, like, no Hispanic searched and one white, one Asian driver searched. Again, in 2016, there were no Hispanic searched, four Asian driver searched. These are really, really small numbers. I don't know if Nancy or Kayla, if you want to talk about the problem of numbers and statistical significance for a moment. And it's still officer perception, too. Right. Well, it just comes down to when there's just... If the numbers are small enough, it means that one more ticket or one less ticket could change what we're looking at. I mean, there's just a little difference in a lot, so that's why... And we could look at this graph for Asian and Hispanics, too, but the black versus white is just the most interesting comparison, at least. There's the most power behind it, and it has the most statistical power. It wouldn't be... I mean, I think it's... People who train statisticians would caution you about saying anything about the value of my statistician, but that's the... Well, I definitely agree for when we're looking at searches in the next couple of graphs. For tickets and warnings, there's probably a decent number, but the patterns were strongest with these two groups. I want to go to the next slide. So this is just putting those two last slides together so you can see what license violations do. And to put a final point on it, when our car stops show that when Burlington police officers make a stop, 6% of the time a white motorist has a suspended license, 15% of the time a black motorist has a suspended license. That's not a value judgment or casting aspersions or saying anything negative about the black driving population. I think there's a big... You can think about a lot of reasons from... I'm kind of saving them for last, but why in Vermont a person of color feels awkward fighting a traffic ticket and doesn't have the money to pay it. Got it in the first place. Or got it in the first place. If you factor out the license violations, there's likely to get a warning as a ticket in the first place. So they're no more likely statistically to get a warning or a ticket in the first place. I don't know if you're asking the question that I was wondering about. Any work done on why people are actually getting stopped because you're talking about when they're stopped, but are people of color stopped more often? So they are. They're stopped at a greater rate of their population. Figure that out like 10 years ago. Then it happens every year. That's not an underlying insignificance. It is either. No, it's not. One of the interesting things, if you look at the data too, is that we're stopping fewer people overall including fewer drivers of color. In 2015 there were 382 black driver stops. In 2017 there were 293 black driver stops. 167 fewer stops of black motorists over the course of the three years. So there's just fewer interactions with motorist of color happening in the first place as we go through year to year. You have statistics on reasons for stops. So we do, yeah. Yeah, right. I don't know. I don't imagine finding out somebody doesn't have a license. You don't ride around checking license plates. Well, part of it too. I think there's a, in a city like this, and Eric can talk to this, there are some, and Mike too, there are some cops who know driver's licenses are suspended when they see them. Oh, sure. You'll hear it on the radio. You'll hear an officer saying, you know, is so and so still suspended? Because, I mean, this town is small enough that you'll recognize you'll be able to drive it. That could have a compounding effect on getting stopped and pulled over and getting more tickets, right? Yeah, I mean, every time the guy drives, you still... Right, so another thing to follow up on would be as the commissioner pointed out is why people are getting stopped in the first place. We want to see if drivers are for particular rates and more likely to get pulled over for equipment violations, right? We'll likely get pulled over for having a suspended or expired registration or expired inspection again, because that deals with the ability to pay for things. It deals with the ability to take off work and have the type of job. I'm going to spend the day getting my car inspected or, again, like registering a car in Vermont is expensive. I found that out the hard way. I was astounded how expensive it was. And if that's the reason for getting pulled over and then you get tickets, it starts a vicious cycle, which is what you're talking about. One of the indications when we'll be coming out of a cycle like that is just year after year, we're stopping fewer cars in general and we're stopping fewer motorists of color and fewer white motorists, for that matter. So, hit rates. Hit rates are when an officer believes that he or she has probable cause to make a stop, what percent of the time do they find contraband in the stop? And I'll give you an example of something that people find troubling, and I agree with which is that if you stop white motorists and decide to search them and you're getting contraband 68% of the time, but then you're stopping black motorists in deciding to search them and getting contraband 54% of the time, the worry is that as a statistically significant difference you're imputing a suspicion on your encounters with black motorists that's not corresponding with the recovery of contraband. So, that's an indication that there's a bias. It's something about the quality of the encounter that has nothing to do with the objective investigation is yielding a suspicion. And one of the things that that could be and there are all sorts of stereotypes that could play into that we've all talked about them, like, oh this could be a guy up from New York City bringing drugs into town, I want to search him or hey, I smell some marijuana on this white driver and I smell it on this black driver but I'm going to pursue the lead on this black driver because, you know, man he could have something in the car because of a certain perception about the person's race. That's an indication of potential bias. We were really, really frank with cops about this. Every time I speak about race data this is one of the most important concerns we have. Stops are intrusive. They're very, very stressful and they have big consequences. So we have to be very careful about how we perform them. We've also done better interdiction training. So what you see here, we could go all the way back but we started with 2015. The disparities increased as we go back. Not tremendously, but they're more than 20% spread when we go back. 2015, when I got here it was a 14% spread in the hit rate. In 2016 it's not significant but it's worth noticing that they were burst. Officers were 73% likely to find contraband on black motorists 69% on white motorists. That's just a 4% spread. It's not significant. It just shows a reversal of the trend. This last year they were what's important to note, two things were to actually find contraband. So they found it over 80% of the time on both races of motorists. 80% on black drivers, 83% on white drivers. So you're going in 2015 where cops are number one finding contraband like 50%, 60% of the time less often for black drivers to the next year where they're finding it about 70% of the time and equally on drivers of both races. Then a year after that 80% of the time and equally on both races. So it's an improvement that's sustained over two calendar years that's gone up in the overall efficacy of the searches and it's closed the gap in the racial divide. Contraband is always drugs. Yeah, I mean, so here's the thing and it's worth bringing up. In our case in Burlington like this you know the state police they should offer their own account. Our cops don't go into these car stops thinking they're going to find the motherload of heroin or the kilo coming up from New York City almost all the time it's marijuana related the officers know that and we've said it like when marijuana becomes legal here in short order it's going to really I mean someone can say the officers I smell marijuana on you and the driver can say yes you do because I smoked it at home half an hour ago or not wait they probably say a few hours ago what causes that give you to go further and you know the answer is much much much less or none right very little so I think a lot of the churches throughout the state of Vermont not just in Burlington are going to go down because this won't offer a level of criminal suspicion anymore so would it so then it wouldn't be a pretext for stopping somebody anymore I mean I because I would think it could be an officer could think of it in terms of like impairment of safety and impairment well there's it right so I don't know what you're going to say Bob I don't want to ask a different question so to answer question it's not a pretext it's just a thing worth saying for the a pretext is the traffic violation right or the reason for the stop and then the reason to go further is the criminal suspicion that the smell of marijuana arouses I think I don't know what the judges are going to say but thinking about what they might say the judge would say the simple smell of marijuana in and of itself is the smell of a substance that is legal to possess and consume in our state so what else was it work that allowed you to take the search whether and it would have to be something like noticeable impairment like the body camera the evidence we have to show slurred speech watery eyes really bad driving indicating impairment or a quantity of marijuana that's illegal which is going to be what more than two ounces something like that in personal possession the chief is looking at other people so it's going to be what's that more than an ounce so the person for some reason like a pound of marijuana in the back right that's still or smoke indicating so thank you something if smoke is coming out indicating recent consumption of marijuana that's different you're not allowed to smoke it in a car but it will foreclose an avenue of criminal investigation that's been open for a while and I think it will change the course of car stops in Vermont what's your question as far as the searches go do you break them down by consent yeah so these are two types of searches these are consent searches we don't break out consent but we break searches apart in other ways I don't know if you want to talk you've done a lot of work on that yeah please so if you when you train the officers do you tell them they have to have probable cause before they ask for consent so there's reasonable suspicion and there's probable cause I know the distinction and so officers might conduct a consent based search that was prompted by reasonable suspicion or probable cause and we track those separately so what you're looking at here are searches where the driver consented to a search so there's no search warrant based searches here these are including both reasonable suspicion and probable cause so do you break them down by black and white as far as reasonable suspicion versus probable cause on the consent I think the consent is a concern for a lot of judges at times yeah the tricky thing is really to create a line between reasonable suspicion and probable cause I think you can get a little bit you can't stop the car without reasonable suspicion well you can stop the car for probable cause you committed a traffic violation and the suspicion is a lower standard so you've got to at least have reasonable suspicion so all these searches are going to be based off at least reasonable suspicion the question is when you go on to push the person to have a suspicion there is a distinction so you have to have probable cause you've committed a traffic violation there's no reasonable suspicion of a traffic violation you can stop a car based on reasonable suspicion of a crime not a traffic violation so either one of those two once we stop the car we decide to the decision to pursue the search would be reasonable suspicion or probable cause that there's something illegal going on under the car that we want to start over thank you um and so I don't know Mike if you want to talk about as a detective investigator and a person with you know just 20 years in the Burlington police per se like how you think that the new marijuana laws might change behavior police behavior car stops the dog doesn't alert different ways based on different drugs he just alerts no I think that my guess is we're going to run into a lot where officers are going to stop cars for one particular thing they're going to smell marijuana whether it's fresh marijuana they're going to smell in a bag or they're going to smell burnt marijuana um and I guess we're going to have to make assessments about whether or not we have enough information as to whether the amount that we think in the car is a criminal amount I'm not sure how we're going to distinguish that without other information that we have information from some sort of an informant or a tip that was called in or just a variety of other information I think that we're going to probably have to walk away from those traffic stops without any sort of further investigation um but it's certainly going to be challenging and uh you know we're working right now trying to determine what is our policy going to be here as it relates to marijuana in investigations uh how are we going to train the folks to respond to these sorts of situations when we've now stopped a car for a violation and we have this other element of you know maybe green unburnt marijuana smell that could be two pounds marijuana it could be right but it's not on it's just a simple smell no longer going to be an indication of a crime and I think it's important that when we talk about marijuana the number one thing is public safety and the number one thing with public safety marijuana is operating a vehicle um one out of four people killed uh one out of four drivers killed fatally last year in Vermont had elevated levels of THC in his or her system learned that today I had the facts hold on so just that or anything else oh it's what um I can hand you the uh of Vermont's 63 fatal motor vehicle crashes in 2017 one in four had the presence of THC the main mind altering ingredient found in the cannabis plant that's the Vermont so I'll put that out so I'm just saying not to draw a conclusion about that here but that's what we're concerned about so if that's true um it's not the simple smell that matters it's how is the driver acting right it's a driver acting like a driver who can properly safely convey a vehicle um if the answer is yes I'm just telling me Mike's puzzling through it we're not going to have much to go on at the roadside right uh it's not about just like getting marijuana off the streets at all costs that soon corporations will be making huge profits off marijuana here uh in Vermont in no time um so long way to say it and it's kind of what you started uh by asking is that most of these searches are for marijuana they're based on probable uh cause a reasonable suspicion that marijuana is in the vehicle and when marijuana becomes legal that avenue will be foreclosed to police I predict you will see a decrease statewide and here in searches period next slide Eric so imperfect data um this is the case anywhere it's important to realize the limit actually sorry to I mean Nancy I know you did a great job of encapsulating this if you want to talk about and you've been wrestling with our imperfect data so if you want to talk about imperfect data when we looked at 2017's data more carefully we found a number of issues especially with searches that the way it was coded and the data was a logical it would say like it's not a search but they found contraband or something like that and so when we look through we found these errors and it made us more cautious about looking back at past years so we audited the searches for 2017 and 2016 and 2015 but the years before that we're less sure about and there were all sorts of errors like the chief said any sort of data says can have some errors but they included transcription errors when just records wrote something that was different from what the paper ticket had uh interpretation errors um we read the narratives of these incidents and found that sometimes the driver would hand contraband to an officer the officer would say there was contraband found but it wasn't officially a search and so we excluded those from the search count um and then also there were ticketing errors where if an officer stopped a car and searched for drugs and then only gave a ticket for the drugs but not for the traffic violation it just wasn't showing up in our data set of traffic tickets um so we included those searches as well because they did originate from a traffic stop so we just found enough of these that it made us cautious about trusting um past years of data and it's something um going forward we're going to think about and so you're saying I mean we very thoroughly audited 2016 and 2017 um we took a good look at 2015 but the data from 2012, 2013, 2014 um you know we'd rather have accurate data here now closer to the present time but this is not a new thing I mean this is you know uh professor Sugino brought this up uh in a lot of her analyses and frankly a lot of police departments say oh our data is no good so you can't draw too many conclusions from it like I'm not exactly comfortable with that I'd rather draw the conclusions that we can draw off the best data we have uh it's I'm saying a lot of folks offer a defense to the disparities saying well there are disparities but the data is not good data and I mean I'll take the best estimates we have we'll conduct our audits and we'll go with what we know and so we think our data in recent years is actually pretty robust um but one of the things we worry about is the data in the past might be better or worse I mean there were like successful searches that I'm sure were missed in 2012 uh across races I'm just not going to invest hours of like precious analyst time and looking at what happened in 2012 when like 15, 16, 17 is more instructive I mean data collection is required by law maybe we should go back and update the law to say it needs to be good data right I mean and I think that you're right about that I think our data is getting better every year and I think we have like a staff that like audits our data I think that a lot of police departments in Vermont comply with the law as best they can and I don't want to speak but there are multiple person police departments they and a lot of them make um make traffic enforcement a big part of what they do I'd love for them to have more accurate data all I'm saying is I think comparatively our data is probably pretty good it's been talked about as a model absolutely yeah yeah and the state police are excellent at uh getting on top of their data next slide uh room for improvement so um so it's important to know like we're not here to say we're not going to get on an aircraft carrier or a lawn and say mission accomplished because it's not there's still disparity within policing there's still disparity within the county within our city and within the country I mean there's no way around that like people of color bear an oversized burden in a lot of different ways in our state and you see it when they go to get a cup of coffee or not at Starbucks so the point is it's not hey we're done here it's that we've made important we become more self aware we made progress in very very important ways uh within the police department but it's part of an overall upward trend in a continuing path towards more self-awareness so one of the things that is important to note is that black drivers are stopped um more often as a percent of the population than white drivers so uh we'd like to get a better handle on that one of our next projects is going to be as Eric uh Cradivill brings up um is it equipment violations is it expired registration is it expired inspection what's driving the difference in the stop rate um we also want to see if we can do what's called a veil of darkness test which is in the middle of the night the chances of you knowing who's driving by race behind the wheel are significantly diminished during the day you're more likely to know who's driving so does the disparity in who stopped persist across the hours of the day or does it diminish at night and increase during the day right that's an important test that I know uh the crime research group in Montpelier does and we're interested in doing we're also like Bob alluded to one in a why different races is there a difference by type of violation um so that is will be helpful and also blacks are searched seven percent of the time during stops uh and whites are searched one percent of the time that type of disparity exists year to year consistently in fact this is on the high end uh so that is something that we want to understand the gold standard is when you do the search are you getting the contraband we want to understand why we're developing probable cause and reasonable suspicion by across races in the first place um and is it a bias towards you know and I've said this many times do you smell marijuana coming out of a car that's driven by two white students with a uvm sticker and not pursue that lead although you would have found contraband but you with the same fact pattern with two black occupants pursue the lead right that's something to think about right why folks will bear more of a burden for that reason could you do an audit going back for the time of day some of the old data yeah I mean the time of day is definitely something I can find the veil of darkness methodology is a bit complicated but it is it is possible to look at and that's if you don't want to do it it's just like when university were to come in and do it they charge like University of Albany does veil of darkness test if you pay them for it and it's thousands and thousands of dollars right so it's it's not um I think my folks up to it but um it's not something we could just like have by next week or next month um so it is intended to look at um disparities and stop rates so you know decision to pull over a car as opposed to what happens downstream of you know after the cars have pulled over because you know day late for nighttime when you get up to the window you're gonna have a pretty good idea so the question is you know are police officers targeting drivers of color or white drivers with that decision to initially pull them over well yeah I mean we want answers to all the questions about what happens afterwards too all the way down to when they end up in jail interestingly um a little over a year ago I was working on a a programming project and I actually did that study I took Vermont State Police had like 240,000 traffic stops over the course of like five years and I did a study to basically look at the proportion of the traffic stops by race and I actually found the highest proportion of minority stops at nighttime so it was essentially around 10 p.m. until about 5 p.m. is where I saw a higher proportion and they're on the highway too that's another factor yeah it is interesting you know we have ambient light on our streets so it might be we have less of an effect of you know bill of darkness versus what year did you look at that I just looked over basically I want to say was 2012 until like the end of 2016 or somewhere so one thing too well there's two things to note I don't know what the next slide is there may not be a next slide right so just go back yeah so two things to note one is that the amount of searches has gone down slightly year to year but it hovers at about 50 so in 2015 there were 53 searches motorists citywide total for the year in 2016 if you can add the numbers up on the back it's 54 last year it was 50 so it's a rare thing for all races considering that we make anywhere from 3 to 5,000 traffic stops and if you look at the you know if we care about like the lived experience of Vermonters and Vermonters of color the disparities are real the outcomes are real the problems with suspensions are real but you know we had 20 black motorists searched last year 15 the year prior 13 the year prior so it's once every 18 to 19 days this happens to one person that's a real thing it's a real real for them you know I think when we think about really really troubling things like stop question and frisk in New York you're talking about a city of 8 million 600,000 stop questions and frisks that's a much more invasive practice than our stops it's not diminishing the the importance of what's going on but every fewer stop or every each unsuccessful stop that doesn't occur meaning when we don't get excuse me each unsuccessful search or each fewer search is like a measurable difference in the lived experience of the of the population of people being searched so although the small numbers have small effects each decrease in that number has a big effect on the total I mean that's if you follow what I'm saying do you follow what I'm saying because I'm not being precise the other thing is that there are fewer stops happening than ever I think that one of the things that cops see is that their stops will be scrutinized you can talk about their experience in traffic court I mean a lot of cops say that they have a very very hard time prevailing in traffic court no matter how much they prepare that's a whole story for another time but we've seen since 2015 a 40% decrease in the number of stops total across all races so we're stopping 40% fewer motorists and what's interesting about that is that the incidents have not gone up so one of the conversations I've had with my officers is if you're doing stops to promote traffic safety and you're doing many many many fewer stops the accident rate is staying the same we have to consider how vital this is as an intervention because it's an intervention against everyday people motorists are motorists they're your mom, your kids your neighbor and it's very stressful for them and it has serious consequences and when we do them apparently whether we do a lot or a little or 40% fewer it's not changing the accident rate we just have to think about them as as an intervention and whether they're worth it or not not to say that they're not worth it they are but we have to be careful would it be more important just to go after red lights and stop signs and unsafe lane changes and less so about equipment less so about inspections right it's important asking like how does an expired inspection make the road more dangerous how does insurance I'm gonna be firm on you gotta have insurance these are machines that could hurt someone but registration not paying Vermont for registration does not necessarily make the road less safe so we have to contend with that I think these are important questions and lastly I promise I'd give the caveat that there are big social implications to suspended licenses if you think about what getting a ticket means you don't want to fight it you gotta pay it it's expensive poverty and race intersect across America as well as here in Vermont it's harder for people in poverty to pay we don't have we have a regressive ticketing system whether you drive a Lamborghini in a Tesla or a 25 year old Hyundai same price for the ticket but your ability to pay is vastly different if you want to fight the ticket number one you have to be able to appear in traffic court during business hours which is when most people work you have to be able to take a day off for work you have to work the type of job where the boss will give you the day off and you have to work the type of job where you can afford to take the day off you have to go there and have the courage to either number one the money to hire a lawyer if you have the money to hire a lawyer maybe you just want to pay the ticket I don't know but you have to have the money to hire a lawyer you have to know how to find a lawyer you have to know how to engage with a lawyer which for a new American or refugee or English as a second language person is difficult and if you can't afford a lawyer you have to go and argue the ticket yourself so cops will say listen when I go to traffic court I always feel like I flip a coin about whether on the winning end or losing end that's a cop going in with glum prospects imagine a person who doesn't want to take the day off whose boss wants them back at work who doesn't have the money to pay the ticket he can't afford a lawyer and doesn't know the court system going into that it's very intimidating so I know that the AG, T.J. Donovan had a license restoration program it was a very short duration it was kind of a one-time thing I think that the state programmatically if it cares about equity has to take a more comprehensive look at why it suspends people's licenses what the consequences are and whether it means it or not you know it goes hand in hand with equity so that's kind of the thought I know you know we've asked questions along the way but if you have any other questions I guess this would be a good time to bring them out nope alright and again this is this will be a continuous thing right it's not we did our traffic stop analysis and we're done it's just the first installment so you can look forward to more thank you thank you so we already got through the chief's report so next is review of incoming correspondence last meeting that we wouldn't read through them you guys all had them so if there's questions feel free to reach out or bring them up now but again we have another round wonderful remarks from community members about their interactions with officers and their going out of their way to make a difference could we hear like one or two of them it's nice to hear that a local gentleman who wrote to the chief's to say he wanted to share a very positive experience he had with Officer Bartle who's a new officer I think she's been the department for about a year he this gentleman not been involved with the initial outreach but worked to support Sarah and the victims behind the scenes Officer Bartle went out of her way to keep him up to date so that he could do his job as a friend and a counselor she's exactly the kind of person we want in uniform personable, confident, exudes competence and her efforts resulted in a one year restraining order issued and now she believes she will make an arrest the case could have led to a homicide given what the suspect was saying and doing she was convinced and so was Aaron so you're doing your doing solid work brings in young cops like Aaron well done so it was also a compliment to the chief's some of the others are a bit longer I don't know if you want to get further into them but they're you know it's often every week I'm getting reports from it's good to know it's good to hear another detective and their efforts in a recent case and so next is an update on the process involving officer complaints and then I don't know were we going to do it again periodically was that the plan that's the plan still in the process of doing it I don't know chief right we're talking about the review of the complaints I know we divvied them out among the members of the commission have we met with all the members of the commission about all the open complaints just done one set I did one set I think everyone's done that one set but that was a while ago I guess do you know how many more complaints we've gotten in 2018 okay we could just plan to follow up on that at the next meeting I don't mean to you not to give it short shrift you wanted to discuss Stephanie Seguino's report so I thought it would be good to in conjunction with that discuss our report but I didn't mean to preclude comments on Stephanie's I mean and I think what I might do you know I was realizing that some people might not have read it and so maybe since we had the presentation about this department we could make sure everybody has a chance to look it over I mean she does have a you know at the beginning like some her main points or whatever but I think it might be good for people to look at it and then maybe follow up at the next meeting and have a conversation about it and so I sent out links to her recent report and the one from the year prior as well they were out they were in the commission email so you can just get them right yeah I think it would be good I mean I think it's I've actually been involved in both you know obviously looking at it here but also on a statewide perspective there's a lot of you know there's a lot of stuff going on about that right now so I think it's important for us to continue to talk about it so we'll add that to the next next month's agenda and I mean I don't know if I mean we could mention it to her I haven't I you know I've last time I heard from her was when she sent the report I asked her if she wanted to come tonight I told her that we I sent her this to review and I said that we were going to discuss her report and in this one she said she'd have to pass tonight but she's always engaged on this right so maybe we could let her know if she wants to come to the next one yeah it's always nice to have her okay so where are we commissioners updates or comments I mean I've told people and you know let people know that I was the chair of the attorney general's panel on racial disparities and the criminal and juvenile justice system and it was an advisory panel and we submitted a report and then I resigned so and the vice chair resigned too it was kind of dramatic but and so I think that they're in the process of replacing the chair and the vice chair but a lot of times these conversations and of course the you know the statewide information is something that we're having conversations about all the time you know and I just resigned because it's I mean if anybody has seen the charge it's huge and doing it as a volunteer was just too much like I just feel like the work isn't going to get the justice it needs with volunteers and so and I'm also just kind of cutting back on volunteering um so anyway I mean we I took it six months and then resigned and I think the work is going to go on but anyway I just wanted to let people know about that um and I'm not the community justice center anymore but I'm still involved in a lot of things in the community um yeah so I just wanted to share that with people does anybody else have anything any updates or anything I had one question just chief anything new on the fair and impartial policing any changes from trying to yeah we sent our response to the federal government at that level and haven't heard back from them the policy and some of the materials we have a in fact if you want to talk about the training for fair and impartial policing that's basically ready to go um our in-house yeah it's ready to go we're just block training right now so officers are cycling through their week of block training to get all the required things that the police academy manage that we get every year every other year so we're finishing that up trying to implement that it's definitely on top of a list of things as well as another training around disorderly conduct arrests that just want to be presenting information to officers based on case law things like that yeah and that's a good point we're talking about fair and impartial policing generally if you remember from last summer one of the issues that the ACLU had it made the news was that they felt that we were making unfair disorderly conduct arrests and that they had a disproportionate impact on people of color what we found is that most law in Vermont is fairly straightforward you know murder is murder assault is assault I'm simplifying it a little bit disorderly conduct really really and I see the the toughest one to charge the toughest one to charge I can even have you you talk about it because you have to know the case law the statute if you just go by the statute you're not going to be able to what does that mean in practice what does abusive behavior mean what is loud what is unreasonable noise mean and it varies from county to county so we're finding that cops trained at the police academy or just trained in the statute they don't go any further because different counties have different case law it's not like completely different across the state but it does vary we found that our young officers who are the ones out there on the street likely to make these arrests didn't understand the case law and it wasn't their fault no one had taken the time here or there to tell them this is what unreasonable noise means in practice when a jury gets their instructions this is what you know tumult or fighting means this is what abusive language means so we're hoping that officers when they do make this totally conduct arrest will be able to make the right discernment and cite the right case law and I've been in touch with the ACU we've identified that that correction and I got a stress it's not that's just because the union walked in it wasn't the cops didn't have the knowledge to make the right charging decisions and it was an oversight we're going to give it to them as far as the fair and impartial policing policy training one of the things the cops know the skeleton of it already but the training is good because it gives several scenarios about you encounter a person at the roadside and you believe that they're undocumented or ICE calls you and says we need to know when this person is going to get released with a citation or whatever the answer is they have to it's scenario based about encounters that cops typically engage in so that we can make sure that in that very practical way they know when they can and can't contact the federal government and when they can and can't prolong the detention and everything like that and that's going out right after the block training that's a document we can share with you it's not a secret by any means but I mean there's still that language in there that says that if they want to they can that's the federal law I mean I know you're I mean it's from the city attorney to the states attorney to you know the state attorney general like that's the federal law we cannot prevent officers from communicating about immigration status with the federal government but anytime any cop communicates with the federal government here period we want to know about it you can't just be off calling the feds on your own so if they do it we are interpretation of the law is that we can't say in advance you have to go to supervisor you can exercise your rights of the federal law but you have to tell the supervisor what you've done so that will be department policy and that's not to single out immigration per se it's like if I found out if any of us found out you were just off calling the FBI on your own we'd take issue with that too and so I know there is that tension about their ability to communicate but that's the law and what they can't do as a way of treating people fairly is pretty robust you can't prolong the tension right you can't inquire about immigration status unless it narrowly relates to a criminal investigation which it often doesn't you can't hold on to someone for I don't even know how it would you can't hold on to someone for a civil detainer right you can only act when there's a criminal warrant for an immigration violation signed by a judge these are all things that go a long way to protecting our crime victims and our witnesses and people at the roadside who are undocumented and just I think the sentiment is the cops it doesn't weigh on them heavily for two reasons number one you know we're not in a agricultural enclave here where we see a lot of undocumented workers and it's never our cops have never been focused on immigration enforcement ever to begin with like I check in I'm sorry to just use your gene but gene is a union delegate I check in with the union often saying is this an issue or cops contending with it I mean I don't know you don't have to you want to say anything feel free but right right cops aren't like man I let one get away it's just not it's not we're fortunate in that way I mean cops would rise to the test of being fair but it's not this thing that's happening often please those are both areas that become really high liability for the officers and so we want to make sure they have all the information they can to make the right decision we don't want them to be violating federal law we don't want to not explain that to them but we also don't want to be violating the rights of the folks that they're encountering and as it relates to the disorderly conduct arrests you know they're the ones that two o'clock in the morning there's two thousand three thousand drunk college kids downtown and you have a couple of people yelling and hollering and posturing and screaming and when you go to arrest those folks it usually involves some sort of physical encounter where the officer can get hurt somebody else can get hurt you know if we're making unreasonable seizures as it relates to the Fourth Amendment that opens us up to liability and so we really feel it's important for them to understand the case law as it relates around these arrests so that they know you know this is a case that is not going to be recognized by the court due to this case law as you know a lawful arrest and therefore I'm not going to make an arrest in this case because it's not going to stick and I could get hurt the other person could get hurt it could open on myself or the department to you know liability and those sort of things so they're both very important trainings for two completely different reasons but you know both very important for the folks that are out there to be aware of and think about I mean and I know that there are a lot of ways that officers interact and you know intervene in situations like that short of arresting them even the presence of them downtown has an impact so you know there's a lot of other things that can happen deescalating situations that don't end up in arrest and I've seen that happen sometimes it has a positive impact sometimes it has a negative impact so it really depends on who the individuals are and the officers who the individuals that are being sort of you know so many factors that we're going to play in that we really feel after looking at this and seeing the liability that the officers are you know these positions that are put into with increased liability that we're doing them to serve as if we're not keeping them for the case law and how it relates to the arrests that are being used I had just one more follow-up on the vehicle the what are we calling this vehicle emergency response vehicle I had expressed a little bit of concern last week just that I'm still just kind of mulling that around but I'm wondering if there's an opportunity to see it you had mentioned I thought that maybe the commission could yeah right now it's at a secret location I'm just kidding it's it's so seven days actually by the commission minutes and there were a story about it I don't know if you saw that so loose lips and chips but it's it's so there's a photo of it in seven days but I'm not trying to be how do you get a photo of it and on the wraps it's in the warehouse with the hood up yeah I don't know how they got in we're looking at a whole separate I'm just kidding we're not looking at anything but it was at it's either at DPW at their garage there or out at the airport until we're ready to roll it out I know that at this point I think it's a DPW we got it they made the walk the New Jersey fabricator got Camel's hump wrong and we just cannot have that so we have to drive the thing back down to New Jersey to get Camel's hump the right way that's a story for seven days yeah the guy was like what's the difference that's Camel's hump buddy we're not on the west side of Camel's hump that would be big trouble chief yeah no kidding so that's where it is today right then it's coming back the question is do you want to see it at the community barbecue or do you want like a commissioner's preview I mean that's the question barbecue is fine for me but it will be definitely rolled out for everyone to see it at the barbecue I mean I don't want to see it because I wanted to try to relay concerns about how it's going to be used no that's fine and once I see it it may be fine it may not be but I thought seeing it first would be a useful thing no and I'd be amenable to that and I'm being serious to have a tour for the commissioner to have the officers that run the truck you know give an orientation just to the police commission or we could do it in a night where we can let the public know we'll be doing the orientation and we can have part of our meeting I don't know what you can do with the cameras but we're going to have our meeting maybe outside for a bit in good weather if it ever becomes spring it's four weeks it will be at the barbecue and you'll be able to see it beforehand I actually have one other question I noticed something on the news and the Vermont State Police was like announcing that they were like figuring out a new way to deal with officers after they've been involved in a critical incident and it sounded like sort of extending the time that they're not back out on the job and I'm just wondering like what's our policy you know I'm concerned about wellness I try to bring it up as often as I remember yeah I mean the state police were putting officers or troopers back in the field pretty quickly after shootings then we had a trooper who was involved in multiple shootings and then two of them very close to each other and they realized that that's a very risky thing and just not good for the officer I know you work with Sunny often about this you're probably the best person to speak to this I know the officer needs to take some time to know more about their events but needs to take some time for themselves so the first thing the officer does is either goes to the hospital or gets medically cleared by a paramedic right in the aftermath to make sure they're okay, get their vitals then in the coming few days Sunny Sunny might refer them to someone else or might say this and they have their head about them it's weeks before they go back to the field number one for investigatory reasons number two just to you know we put them in a place we keep them here at headquarters to see how they're doing and luckily I mean knock on wood this is not a very frequent frequent thing but it's good to know and I thought that I mean we've talked about that before but it was just good to know I mean I think the next thing that we have is an update on encouraging attendance I mean as a matter of fact there was a friend of mine that was going to come tonight but she's not here and in all of the different you know community things that I'm involved in I always encourage people to come um sometimes I do, sometimes I don't I know that there's a lot of people that it's easier for me to get them to show up at the library for like one of the Kaleo things and say that you guys will continue to do those we're not necessarily going to do it every once a month but at least maybe a few over the summer but I do encourage people to come I think a lot of people don't even know that it's a public meeting and they can do it you know what why doesn't between Laura and I will use social media, Twitter, Facebook or maybe if we can do it you know I'll certainly continue to do that do you still want to have Jarlet Dunn come for the next one in hopes that that might get people here um I still definitely want to have him come so is he going to be at the um is he going to be I've reached out, I need to hold up or at least like maybe contracting with them in an emergency if we need to do a search of some sort at the same time that you roll out I always go to say tactical vehicle but I'm not supposed to say oh I mean I don't listen if I we're not calling it a tactical vehicle behind your back I mean rest assured I think that would be sensorial you're like what's going on yeah it's the one thing you don't know yeah really that would be great I also think that it's really important for people to understand like a couple of times I've heard you say chief like if we had this in this situation that's right I mean there's instances of folks using this I expect an amended decision to issue minutes from last month