 Councillor Shannon is also in attendee. So I think people have joined in. So apologies, everyone. I'm not proficient in Zoom. I do not use Zoom as frequently. I use Google Meet, so please bear with me. And I know Shannon is here to help. Okay, let's wait a couple of minutes. There she is. Welcome, Commissioner Roski. Before we get started, Commissioner Cox, do you want to say a few things of why you have your... So yeah, I'm just gonna keep my screen black. I'm struggling with a herniated disc and a pinched nerve and it's just making me miserable, hold on. So I am here, I'm listening, I'll engage, but I just didn't wanna have to be on screen, so. Sorry to hear that. Thanks for letting us know. Sorry, Commissioner Roski, before I get started. No, I just said sorry to hear that. Yes. Okay, so let's get started. It's Tuesday, December 26th, the meeting of the Burlington Police Commission. The time is 6.02 and we have a quorum today with five commissioners present. Commissioner Keith and Commissioner Cumberford cannot be here. Most importantly, let's welcome our newest commissioner, Caroline Hansen. Commissioner Hansen, do you want to introduce yourself for in a minute or two? Can I describe who you are or... Sure, yes. Well, thank you for the warm welcome. I really appreciate it. I'm excited to be here. I live in Burlington in the South End with my husband, Tom Simon and our two kids, Nolan and Calista who both, my son graduated from Burlington High School and is now at the University of Georgia. And my daughter is an 11th grader at Burlington High School. And we've lived a couple of places in Burlington. We started out on Green Street in the old North End and then we lived on North Street for a short time, a couple of years. And then since then I've lived in the South End and I feel very fortunate to live in Burlington. I think it's such a special community and I'm looking forward to working with all of you. Welcome, thank you so much. Also minutes from our October and November special meeting are still being prepared. As you know, it takes a little time with staff limitations and hopefully they'll be ready for you to review for the December meeting. There is also a modification to the agenda. We will add 4.3 to the agenda to have Councillor Shannon address the commission about the draft proposal of the police oversight charter change proposal. So is there a motion to modify the agenda? I move to modify the agenda to add a item 4.3, a communication from Councillor Shannon. Is there a second to that? I'll second. Okay, second for commissioner Garrison. All in favor, raise your hand or say aye. Aye. Okay, all approved. The motion passes. The public is invited to address the commission at this point, Councillor Shannon. Commissioner Rabi, before we move on, I was wondering if Chief Mirad also wanted to actually present as one of the numbered items for the agenda. Sorry. I mean, not the chief's report but regarding the proposed changes to the charter. I'm certainly happy to speak about it. And I know that it had said that there would be an opportunity for me to do as much in Chair Rao's note. We also request that Chief Mirad please weigh in on the report. So I am happy to do that. I don't know if it has to be its own numbered section or not. However, you as a body want that to occur. It's a, I'm amenable to your decision. Right. Commissioner Cox, I was going to give all commissioners and starting with the chief and the commissioner to weigh in on the proposal. So that's instead of having it as a special part of the agenda, I was going to give him time to speak to it. So. Okay, that makes sense. I just didn't want us to forget about the chief. Right. No, no, I will not forget about him. So not to worry. Okay. So the public is invited to address the commission. I don't know if we have any member of the public who wishes to speak. Shannon, I do not see you. So I don't know if we have anyone. Looks like we have one person, at least one person. There are a few with their hands raised. So Romeo Von Herman, I've enabled your mic if you want to go ahead and give your public comment. Okay. Before you start, I just want to make a brief comment that please state your name, where you live and address the comments to the commission as a whole, not a single commissioner. And please keep your comments civil and brief this evening. Thank you. Thank you. Can you hear me commissioners? Yes. Okay. Perfect. Okay. I'll do my best to be brief. I promise. I just wanted to quickly, I know this is the last commission meeting for the year 2023. So I just want to quickly thank the Public Safety Committee for bringing the charter change, proposed charter change draft to the committee, particularly regarding the composition terms and among other issues. And of course this issue of course reflects the commitment and ensuring accountability of the commission as well as safety in our city. So I just wanted to share my gratefulness and gratitude rather for the efforts being made by the both the commission and the Public Safety Committee as well as the police department for being so accommodating in these changes being made. Beyond that, I see the charter change, which I think it's all on the discussion, a significant step in the right direction by reevaluating the composition, as I said earlier, of the commission and its terms and members and so on and so forth. I'll conclude on this, that I do recognize the challenging nature of policing that our city, rather police department faces in our city, which of course is expressed in the use of force report, which our chief will be so gracefully be presenting today. So I just want to thank both the chief, the committee as well as the commission for all the work being done through the entire year. And I look forward to learning more next year as well as many years to come. So thank you for giving me the time and I wish everybody a happy holidays. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. von Herrmann. Is there anyone else recognizing Councilor Grant? Councilor Grant, can you hear me? Yes, I can, can you hear me? Yes. Thank you very much for this opportunity. I will keep it brief. I just want to talk about a couple of things that have occurred this year and my hope for 2024. The work that has been done by the joint committee on ordinance and charter change has definitely been very difficult over the last few months. And I appreciate the time that they've put in. The one thing that has been an ongoing concern of mine is that at times focus was lost. There has been a large amount of focus with regards to disciplinary actions when most of the issues that I saw with other commissioners who served with me at the time for my almost three years were related around a request for training and proper acknowledgement of the seriousness of certain claims. So I just want to say as you review this, to please keep in mind that as recently as our last city council meeting, it was brought up again that the contract that our officers have is one of the best in the country. So they have extraordinary protections. One instance would be the retention of records, which is really important if you are to establish a trend of behavior. But if you're not saving those records for an extended period of time, you may not be able to do that. So their contract extended from one to two years which is still below what is seen as best practice. So that's just one example. There's no time to go through the whole thing. But just a reminder, they have extraordinary protections. What part of the police commission's duty I feel, and this is something that I felt as a commissioner is this balance of looking out for our officers but also looking out for the public. We still have issues around lack of community engagement in the parts of the community that still have a lot of trust issues with the department. I am going to email all the commissioners a meeting from the racial equity inclusion and belonging meeting and give you the timestamp. But there was a report regarding gun violence affecting new Americans in the work that's been done in that area. And there was some deeply, deeply heartbreaking and concerning comments made about the lack of community trust. So I just want you to be able to listen to those comments so that you have an understanding of where some people in our community are still at and the work that needs to be done. I will also say I continue to be concerned about the lack of representation right now for the old North End. There are currently no commissioners from wards two or three. So please be causing it. Please just keep in mind that when people from these areas talk about what we're going through, it may not be the same thing that's happening in other wards. And the final thing I'll say is that at the last public safety committee meeting, I addressed Chief Murad in an effort to improve our relationship. It has been very, very tense at times. The questions that I ask of the department are questions that are being asked of me by my constituents and in fact constituents for multiple wards and not to be treated with respect, to have difficulty getting those questions answered has been very, very difficult. And maybe this is a project that we can work on to have some sort of mediation and I would appreciate the help of the police commission. And I wanna thank you for your time and your work. Thank you, Councillor Brandt. And I look forward to receiving that the copy of that particular report. You can send it to me and Councillor Cox at your time. Thank you. Next speaker is Nicole. Hi, thank you. My name is Nicole Loesch. I am sharing a device tonight. So there is one other person here that would like to speak after it. I'm happy to pass the phone right after or if there's anybody else circle back to us at the end. But thank you for letting me speak tonight. My name is Nicole Loesch. I am a Burlington resident. I live in the South End. I also am a city employee. I have lived and worked for the city for, oh geez, going on 19 years. I'm here tonight because I take a lot of pride in our city, really enjoy my work here and do wanna thank you all for your public service as well. I have found myself in a situation these last few months where I am struggling to find the same pride and confidence in our police department that I have in our city. And so I am here kind of exasperated, kind of looking for some guidance. And I know public forum is not necessarily a place to have questions answered, but I at least wanted to bring this issue up to the commission. And just in a nutshell, I'm really struggling to get clear answers about some of the processes that kind of take place at the police department when crimes are reported. I've tried to ask some questions, filed a couple of complaints, tried to dig into all of the guides and directives that I can find on the website, but I kind of just keep being turned away. And I'm just increasingly concerned. So I will close my public comment there. If there is anybody that I could possibly speak to, to get more information and get some questions answered, I would greatly appreciate that. Thank you. Thank you, Nicole. You are correct. We don't go back and forth at the public forum. There's no Q&A per se. But if you write to both me and commissioner Cox, a brief outline, we can definitely look into the directives and even send you to write a complaint, whatever. There are ways that we can address this rather than the public forum. So I look forward to receiving that information. I know you had mentioned there's somebody else who wishes to speak to you or that's... You just wanna see that? Yeah. So I was just checking in and I think they decided I covered it all and have nothing else to add. So thank you so much. Okay, thank you. I don't see anyone else. Is there anyone else who has their hands raised and would like to speak? Fareed, am I recognizing you're saying your name right? Didn't you hear me? Yes. Thank you. My name is Fareed. I've lived in Burlington for over 25 years. I wanna thank Councillor Grant for tirelessly advocating for the voices of people who are not really in position to attend these meetings, but often it's on the receiving end of the use of force by the police. I wanna thank her for her tireless advocacy and for standing up for us. And I also wanna echo her point about the lack of trust that we have in our police department. And I know like the last couple of weeks there have been campaigns like basically saying like we need somebody who will support the police force, but I don't think the lack of mayoral support was the problem. If anything, it was the excess of mayoral support and the failure to hold the department accountable that got us into this situation. And looking forward, we're gonna have a new mayor but I also wanna emphasize how like the current charter isn't working and I'm very excited that this work is being done. Thank you all for all your hard work and we really need a new charter that works better for us. Thank you very much. Thank you. Anyone else? Anyone else? I do not see any other hands unless someone can point me in this direction. If I don't, yes, it seems like I don't see any other hands. That, thank you everyone. This concludes our section of the public forum of the meeting. Next is Chief's report. Chief Murad, if you were so kind as to start. Sorry, yes, of course, thank you. I'm sorry, I was frozen a little bit there. Yes, of course, thank you. I would ask permission to share my screen if I may. Yes. Okay, all right. Let's see. First of all, it's been a bit. We did not have a session in November. This is a fuller Chief's report than we sometimes see but I know that we have a lot of other very important things on the agenda, including the involvement of counselors and discussions about the charter change issues. And so I will try to go through this quickly but also not giving it short shrift. Because we haven't seen each other since November, there are items from November in this report. On November 12th, I think we had what may be the busiest night, certainly in the agency's modern history. We began the night just around eight o'clock with a gunfire incident. Fortunately, no one was struck in that incident. It occurred in the downtown on Main Street in the vicinity of the comedy club. And it was followed not long after, unfortunately less than an hour and a half later by a double murder at a residence on, I'm sorry, sorry, whoops, wrong thing. I'm trying to click that by a, I thought I could move. Why can't I move? There we go. Apologies, by a residence on Decatur. That was followed then as we were working on that scene. Detectives were called in. We were interviewing witnesses, doing canvases for evidence, et cetera. There was another shooting incident at a residence on East Avenue. We believe both of these were related to drugs and the trafficking of narcotics. The incident on East Avenue involved a person being struck in the lower leg and that person was transported to a hospital. And then finally, not long after that, there was an arson in our headquarters in which an unhoused person entered and set our vestibule on fire. The fire itself did not cause a tremendous amount of damage, but the water did. The vestibule was flooded. Fortunately, sprinklers only went off in that vestibule, but we have an old building. And it's a building that is experiencing a lot of delayed maintenance issues and it or deferred maintenance issues rather. And those sprinklers wouldn't shut off. They flooded the vestibule. That flood went into our lobby, which remains closed. The vestibule itself remains closed. People can no longer enter through that public entrance on the south side of our building. The flood went west along the floor towards the lake, flooded out our records room, caused damage to carpets, caused damage to personal items, caused damage to certain records. Fortunately, not a lot. Again, the fact that it wasn't an overhead sprinkler was a tremendous burst of fortune. And it was a big, there was a lot of issue from that and a lot of damage. We are still assessing that damage and working on that damage. The arsonist was arrested. He has been arrested multiple times since. Obviously, he was not held for any length of time. We are working hard on those other cases. We do believe that we have solved one of those two double, one of the murders in that double murder. We are confident in the identification of the actor in that first double of the first murder of the two. We are working hard on the second and I have great confidence in our detectives. We went to not long after that. That was the 12th of November. A few days later, we went to the NAMI conference, sort of the other side of our coin as far as that being an incredible night of operational chaos and dealing with detectives and patrol resources, all of them doing terrific work, handling a tremendous volume that really is not something we've ever experienced before. To the other side of our coin, which is our community support liaisons, we worked with NAMI, that is the National Alliance on Mental Illness. We hosted a table. This picture shows Anna Wagling, one of our terrific CSLs, handling that table. We're really happy about that relationship. We think it's a very important relationship. We had the holiday tree lighting on Church Street. Another great evening. I think that it was an important evening for the city and certainly for businesses on Church Street. It was a really lovely show as it always is. It is a permitted legal public event, a lawful event, and therefore there are different thresholds for how people may not disturb it. And I think that we did a good job of keeping that safe. We used a lot of the same tools that we've used before. That included strong delineations about where the event legally was being held using the barriers, which you can see on the sides of the picture here. We also had trucks, DPW trucks, with plows blocking on Cherry Street in order to prevent vehicle attacks. We've seen that before. It was very prevalent in the late part of the 20 teens, but we saw a terrible incident of it just two years ago at a Christmas party, a holiday parade in the Midwest, which resulted in many people killed and injured, including children. So this was an important event to keep safe and important event to keep orderly and to make certain that everybody was behaving lawfully. And I think it went very well. And then of course, just a few days after that, the next night, as a matter of fact, we had what was characterized by the mayor as one of the most shocking and disturbing events in our city's history. We had three young men who were shot as they walked down the street. They were speaking a mixture of Arabic and English. They were wearing kfias. They are of Palestinian origin. And we do not know why they were shot, but we know who did it because we had arrested the person detained and arrested within 24 hours. We were able to put out information about that that night and hold a press conference the following day. I'm incredibly proud of the work that our detectives did, not least because Mike Belevo, our Lieutenant Detective Commander, was able to take a tremendous amount of resources that had been thrown at him. Everybody wanted to assist with this terrible, terrible act. We had callers from all of our federal partners, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, including the ATF, including Homeland Security. The Mayor himself received a call from the President to indicate how unusual and important this incident was and the radars that it was pinging on. But it is sometimes difficult to take a tremendous amount of resource when it's thrown at you and you've not used it before and say, we're going to use this effectively. There are many stories of what we call critical incidents in other places where lots of resources pour in, including volunteers or police officers who are off duty from other agencies and they sit because a lot of times there's too much to make use of. Mike did not fall prey to that. Detective Lieutenant Commander Belevo was able to take in these additional resources, FBI agents, ATF agents and deploy them appropriately. And although it was the ATF that knocked on that door and made that detention, which we then worked on search warrants in order to confirm and make an arrest, the decision to send people there to say, we're going to do a double canvas. We're going to reengage at addresses that we looked at last night, but we have to look at again in the light of day. All of that was Detective Lieutenant Commander Belevo. Tremendous work on that. And I am very, very proud to have him in that role. We had a police Academy graduation. So these are our officers who are hired back in August. Some of you came to that event. You all saw that event in that month's chief's report and they were able to finish their experience with the Academy on Friday, December 1st. They graduated, five of them were new hires. One of them was a recycle from the previous class that had been hired in February of 2023 and graduated in the summer of 2023, but he had been injured in the middle of his Academy experience. He was allowed to cycle back in with this police Academy where he had left off in the last one. And that was really wonderful. It's Devin Cotton. We were able to get him in and have him process through. One of these officers won the academic award, top academic award for all the recruits and also the firearms award. She's an impressive young woman. One of these officers is a long-term member of this community who has served on our school board and is a graduate of UVM. One of these officers was a member first of the street outreach team and then was a community support liaison. And so that speaks, I think, highly of the sense that we have people who have a social work bent but still want to become officers and serve with this team because that is the general philosophy of the whole team, the sense that there is overlap there, that it's necessary to work together and that these goals are not incompatible. I'm really proud of this group of young people. I was able to be out on the street with some of them on Christmas Eve. I worked Christmas Eve, the evening shift and also the midnight shift into Christmas morning and was able to watch two of them in action, including on some difficult scenes, a mental health call where we tried at length to convince someone to go voluntarily to the hospital. We did not have the ability to compel that person to go. It was not successful in the long run but I was really impressed by the way in which she made connections and worked with that person. We will now connect that individual with street outreach and our CSLs to not let that sit or lie even though we were unsuccessful on the 24th of getting that individual to the hospital. We also had an apprehension after a stolen car and two people in that car with the car and other forms of stolen property, including debit cards and Christmas presents that a woman had left in her car. We were able to recover all that. The officers were really terrific, these young officers and I'm looking forward to them being team members and growing as they work through their field training program. On December 3rd, not long after that, we took part in the Special Olympics of Vermont. It was a swim meet. This is something that we believe in. We have an officer who has done a lot of work with the torch run and other things. You can see here, Corporal Irwin who is also a recruiting officer and she was there, had a great day and this too is the kind of community connection that we are happy to make. This picture obviously a little bit less happy but it's going in the right direction. We have 69 officers as of December 1st. We've been hovering at that number for a while. I think one thing that is good about the way this chart looks right now in addition to the fact that it is trending up after that terrible, terrible low that we experienced last summer is that it's also, we're not seeing it move down much. We've seen a couple of departures from retirement but we're not seeing other kinds of departures. We used to see a lot. If you look at the previous years prior to the decision to reduce the police department that the city council made in 2020, you'll see that there was a lot of bounce and that bounce is the big jumps are new academy classes coming in but then you'd see a trickle out a lot. What we're not seeing right now is that same trickle and that I think is because the people that we currently have here are here and that's not to say that we won't lose more and that's not to say that we're not having challenges because we are but it is to say that these officers are I think invested in this community, invested in this department and they are here which is something for which I'm tremendously grateful. That said, well, and first I'll go to this next page. Here is a picture again of where we are 69 total but of those 69, only 56 are available as solo officers and what does that mean? Well, that means that there are 13 officers who are either injured or on military leave or on light duty. We have an officer who is gonna be having twins or who are on that field training program, right? So those new young officers of whom I spoke as impressive as they are, they are not solo officers yet. We do not consider them available for independent patrol so they are not counted. And as a result, we get down to 56 and that is still an incredibly precarious place to be. It's not as bad as it has been but it can get bad. So for clarity, for example, I'll bring this up that tonight there were supposed to be five officers on the shift, actually six. One of those officers has voluntarily gone on long-term military deployment. That left us with five. Of those five, two were on vacation and it is the day after Christmas, we have availability factors. Remember that our availability factor, we talked a lot about this during the era of talking about staffing and whether or not to diminish the police department. Our availability factor is 0.86. And what that means is that just based on contractual leave and the leave that people are allowed to take based on the fact that they get vacation time as a component of their contract, we never have 100% staffing, we have 86% staffing because on any given day, 1.14 people are not available. And so, or 14 out of 100 are not going to be available because of vacation, et cetera. So that means that our five-person shift suddenly became, as I said, three people because two were on vacation. All three are sick and that happens too. We have a, you know, there's things going around. We know that a number of people have had COVID and it's sort of out there. What we had to do to address that, that means three officers and two trainees were scheduled for the shift tonight, but all three of the full-fledged officers were out on sick. We had to therefore keep officers from the day shift over, we took our marketplace officers, their schedule is a little bit staggered from the rest of the police department they're not on a regular day shift, they come in later in order to be able to be on the marketplace but they're not on the marketplace tonight because we need them to fill in on the actual patrol and they'll have to do overtime. One of the day shift officers is going to hang out and do additional overtime. Our midnight shift has to come in earlier and this is something that we can make happen in an emergency basis on a single shift like this but it's not something that we can rely on and it's not healthy for these officers nor is it healthy for the work that they can do. Commissioner Oskie, I see your hand, do you want to ask during? Sure, I just want, can you explain once more what is involved in getting supervisors to go on patrol and when you put supervisors on patrol? So a supervisor can't be on patrol because then he or she can't supervise and the number of supervisors we have is dictated by the number of shifts and units that need supervision. So for example, of those supervisors there is a drug unit supervisor, there is a supervisor, as I said, the Lieutenant Commander, you know, Belivow. Now if Mike had been responsible for that case himself and was responsible for actually doing the work in it and having the lead as the investigator, there is no way that he would have been able to deploy those resources that had been given to him in this great emergency and be able to actually effectively manage four or five members of the FBI who suddenly showed up for the first time ever, many of whom are not people that work in Vermont with any regularity. He wouldn't have been able to utilize, for example, the ATF agents we have. Tonight also there's only one supervisor working, there's no sergeant for this team because we're down on sergeants. Although it looks like we have a bad sergeant to officer ratio, the fact of the matter is we are short one, two, three, four, five, five sergeants right now. And that means that we, even if we were to say that they were gonna go answer calls for service, we would not really be able to do that. They can't answer calls for services because they have to look over affidavits. They have to sign off on the work that the officers are doing. They are the person that says, you know, this is what's gonna happen at this scene. Officers do a lot of that on their own, but if a sergeant were to take, for example, I was the sergeant for the midnight shift. If I had suddenly found myself taking a case, this recovered stolen vehicle that we had, if I took that, then I would be back in the house for any number of hours working on the paperwork, making certain that the prisoners were properly cared for, communicating with a judge in order to determine whether or not we're gonna hold them or not. These two people, despite having been caught in a stolen car just two days before this incident, were not held. They were both released by the judge. One was released in the field by us. The other was released with a flash citation according to by a judge's orders. But I would have had to do all that work and nobody would have looked that work over. And in the meantime, there were multiple other calls for service that needed a supervisory eye at the scene that wouldn't have had that supervisory eye because I was doing that job. We don't want our supervisors to answer calls for service, not with any regularity. Every now and then they do pitch in. They certainly come to scenes and can be assisting and can assist at those scenes and be helpful. But the only reason I was able to stay for an hour plus talking to that person who was having a mental health issue was because I was not the evening shift supervisor. There was a sergeant in on the evening shift. Had that not been the case, I couldn't stay there that long. Absolutely not. I'd have to be available for other kinds of calls for service, including three that came up while I was there. So that really is the rationale for not having supervisors do that kind of work. But we are working to rebuild because this situation is not tenable. We can't allow it. We can't keep it going. Here we have some terrific pictures of Anhad Bajwa who is our recruitment coordinator. That's a professional position, not a sworn position. Carolyn Irwin who was earlier in the photograph with the Special Olympics Swim Meet. She is a sworn officer, but is our recruiting officer. Anhad is a professional. She's doing a tremendous amount of work, making certain that we are doing everything we can to encourage people to A, apply here, and B that once they have, we don't put any obstacles in their way. We have to maintain standards and standards are a form of sort of obstacle. We need people to meet those standards. But what we don't want is anybody to fall out because they don't feel that they have been communicated with adequately because they don't feel that somebody is there for them if they've got questions. And right now I can say with confidence that that's not the case because these two people are not just rebuilding our officer corps. Our dispatcher team had fallen to four. It's allotted 12, it's currently allotted 14. We've gotten it bumped up by two, but it was allotted 12 and it had fallen to four full-time employees. That's an even greater percentage drop than the department as a whole suffered. And we have built it up to nine right now. We've got nine full-time BPD employees and three fire department employees who are working in the room. Once we have 10 who are dual certified as fire desk and as police desk, we will be able to absorb, excuse me, all the fire resources and also the fire responsibilities again, which is how it was for many years until this incredible crisis in the emergency communication center. They have built up that source. They have been hiring CSOs and CSLs. We just brought aboard a new CSO. We have another one who is in background. We just hired a new CSL so that we have our full compliment of six CSLs starting in the new year. Right now we have, as I said, as it showed on the previous slide, we've got six CSOs and five CSLs, but we actually have six CSLs as of the beginning of the new year. And they're hiring all these positions. They've done amazing work and I'm really happy with what they're doing, but we've got more to do and we need more tools to do it and we don't need any kinds of disruptions to the momentum that we've got. Now we get into some of the data about where we are as we close out the year and I will do another report that captures year-end numbers and release it publicly long before we meet again at the end of January, but I'll share those numbers once we actually have the year-end numbers. But we're pretty darn close right now. This is the priority response plan. I'd like to point out that there are very specific incidents that are supposed to be referred online. And I think that for quite some time we had been referring too many incidents online, particularly larcenies and retail thefts and we'll talk about that a little bit later. I'd wanted to talk about that at the big public safety forum number two that the mayor had convened, but there were so many speakers and it was getting a little long in the tooth as this is too. So I'll try to pick up the pace. Incident volume, we are well ahead of any incident over the past five years, excuse me, of any year over the past five years. Our incidents are up 23% over last year, 42% over 2021, and they are higher than they've been in any year on this chart. And this chart goes back for a full five years to be able to compare the five-year average to this current year. We have already crossed 30,000 as of today, as of December 16th. And we are at, I think we're not, I don't know that we'll hit 31, but we are well into, that we'll be at the high 30s by the end of the year when we close out. As you can see too, we stack about 14% of the calls and we refer online about 13% and we discovered that that is too high a percentage for online reporting. And I'll explain a little bit more shortly. Whoops, wrong, sorry. This is again, those selected Valcor numbers where we see specific categories that we track a lot. And you can see for yourself sort of where they are. Here's a page I haven't shown in a bit, which puts those same numbers into context. So what this does is it takes a look at the five-year year-to-date average. So 2018 plus 2019 plus 2020 plus 2021 plus 2022 divides it by five, that's your five-year average. And then it compares it to the data for year-to-date 2023. And we have a lot of categories here that aren't going where we want them to go. Particularly, I think you can see that in categories like stolen vehicle up 150% and like overdose up 265%. Here are those larcenies, right? So larcenies up 69% aggregated over the five-year average. It's about in line with last year, however. Last year was a really bad year, far worse than previous years. It was a striking deviation from the former trends. And what this chart shows is it shows the pattern of the incident volume day over day throughout the year. So for example, that the bright pink line, which is 2023 is the numbers that they add up over the course of the year and get into the 1500s, which is where they currently sit. And this is retail theft, which is pretty shocking. Retail theft is being driven, it's up by 235% over the five-year average. And that's barely lower than the increase in overdose, which is 265% over the five-year average. There were 324 incidents of retail theft last year. And as of the 15th of December, there had been 793 in 2023. And a component of this, a significant component of this is online reporting. We are getting incidents that we might not have gotten before and or that we are not able to address because they are being put into an online limbo. And so we are trying to sort of figure out how that works. This slide is a different way to look at that retail theft number. So this shows retail theft by area of the city and over the past several years. And of course, you'll see that the bulk of the increase is in the south end. And you can also see in the small table that is on the left of this chart, you can see that online reporting 78% of these incidents are online reports. What does that mean? That means that retailers, particularly in the south end, particularly the big box stores because that's where that is happening in the south end. It's not, this is not a random store that's somewhere nestled in the back on one of the side streets. It's not, for example, city market in the south end. This is the box stores in the market 32 complex. And what they will do is they do not intervene in any way in retail theft. They simply allow it to occur. They don't report it as it's occurring. They don't call it in. They, their loss prevention comes in at a set date or, you know, it comes in only on Mondays or bundles together multiple incidents over multiple days and sometimes weeks. And then submits all of them together where they then sit because we can't keep up with that kind of volume. Why? Because we're normally have 52 non-supervisory police officers on patrol across all shifts and we currently have 21. And there simply is no way to keep up with that level of incoming calls for service when we're actually dealing with the ones that are coming over by report as well, right? By through 911 or through dispatch and Valcor. What we are doing is recognizing that these incidents should never have been referred online and people shouldn't have been allowed to make them online either. It was never a component of the priority response model. The priority response model, as I outlined it first in 2021 and then in 2022 when I modified it to include online reporting, did not place larcenies or retail thefts online for this very reason. These incidents have to be reported as they happen. And then if officers cannot make it because of the priority response model because we don't have more than two officers available and we're not gonna go to a retail theft if there's only two officers available, they need to be maintained to respond to something like a domestic violence case or a robbery. And if there are more than two officers available they respond in real time to a retail theft. But when we stack incidents for the priority response model we sometimes delay response by a couple of hours or maybe a couple of days at most. When incidents go to online reporting they are delayed by months and the state's attorney has rightly complained about this recently, which is that there are incidents for example a retail theft that occurs in the south end on a date in February is reported on a date in March and then is not farmed out to an officer until a date in June. And then a person is not identified for it and cited and then referred to the court until a date in October. That is not a way to make these issues to address these issues. Commissioner Roski. Thank you for this presentation of the data. I think this is the first time at least that I've seen it broken out by retail theft incidents by area. And this is not so much of a question as a comment that we hear that it seems like it's not quite accurate to say that we hear that retail theft on the marketplace is out of control but that's not what this data says that it's not actually that much higher. I mean, it's a problem and it's going up and that's a bad thing, but it's not crazy out of control that the number, the high incident is as pointed out here is because of those big box stores. It's just helpful to see this because it seems like the common perception or what we hear is that downtown businesses are seeing such a great increase in larceny and that doesn't seem to be, or retail theft doesn't seem to be the case. Well, I mean, I think the problem here is that what's being done in the south end is completely overwhelming the others. The fact is that the downtown area, which is the green line next down to go from 136 to 191 is a 30% increase. And that is definitely notable. It's also certainly I think more notable to retailers on the marketplace who tend not to be corporate retailers. The vast majority of retailers on the marketplace are very slim margin retailers who are the personal owners and often operators of their stores. They don't have policies around this. I don't think they've got the same right-off ability. I frankly don't think that, I don't think the big boxes care all that much about this. They certainly aren't encouraging any kind of stoppage. Whereas for example, Hanifurt in the new north end now routinely employs a sheriff to stand and be present in order to defeat something they've experienced far, far too often, which is people just strolling out with completely full carts. So I think that the box stores need to sort of undertake some of that rather than merely using us as a reporting service in order to validate what I believe are primarily right-offs. And I don't think that that's a phenomenon that we see on the marketplace. I think those retailers and market, those business people are much more affected by the increase. And if it weren't for that red number, I think that number, if for example, if this charts axis only went to 200, I think that that move from 136 to 191 would be pretty striking. Anyway, so this is an ongoing thing that we're gonna deal with. The biggest way we are dealing with it currently is that we are cracking down on what can and cannot be reported online. That's caused some frustrations. But the fact is that the only things that are supposed to be reported online are the 15 online categories that are shown in the priority response plan. Anything else that is supposed to be reported in through dispatch and then we are figuring out ways to make certain that it doesn't languish in sort of the online reporting limbo. Stacking is a form of limbo at times too. And for example, I don't have my VALCOR screen up right now but at any given time, there are usually one or two incidents that are stacked. An example would be the shift that I just supervised. We had an alarm from an alarm company. No key holder was going to respond to that. And with the time that the call came in, we did not have the resources to go address it. And so it didn't get addressed. It got stacked. And at some point we call and the next business day, they say, yeah, nothing happened. It was just a faulty alarm. Nobody broke in. We closed it out. Or we say, oh gosh, there was a burglary that night. And now we're gonna change it into a burglary from an alarm call and we're gonna address it in that way. But at the time that it came in, we didn't have available officers to go to it. That's a stacked call. And that may sit on the screen for some time. In that particular instance, it sat on the screen. It was still sitting on the screen when I left at eight, just about nine o'clock on Christmas morning. So another example that also in real time, we had a person causing a ruckus outside the DFW warming shelter. A person who had not gotten a bed who is not really eligible for a bed anymore because of recurring terrible behavior who's been trespassed from most locations that do services in Burlington was a problem at nine at the same time that we were all down addressing the mental health issue was gone by the time officers were available, came back at the same time that we were all addressing the stolen vehicle and then was not there anymore once officers were available. And then finally came back a third time at three in the morning and was arrested because at that point we did have officers available to go make that intercession even though we only had two non-supervisory officers on the shift, plus me. So some other stuff that we did show at the public safety forum, the first one gunfire for this year, our gunfire is much lower than last year's, which is good. It's higher than any other year other than last year, however, it has four, you know, there were fewer people struck this year than in previous years. But one of those incidents in which people were struck was, as I said earlier one of the most horrible incidents that we've had as a city and another was a double murder. This graphic does not count people there may be more than one person struck in any one of these boxes. For example, the red box in 2023 is a double murder. That's two people dead, not just one, but it is one incident. Similarly, there were three young men struck on Prospect Street and this does not display all three. It's just one incident. This is murder that we've experienced over the years including this year. And again, we have every single one but the one that is currently open from the early November incident of these has been solved and presented to a court. Investigating serious crime. Also another slide that we showed at that public safety forum and dug much more deeply into it over the course of that. So I don't want to cover too much of that but this shows you what we have to investigate serious crime with in 2023 versus in 2029. And it is a smaller set of resources. This chart does include supervisors in these numbers even though again, a supervisor cannot be the primary officer on a case. I cannot send the sergeant for the drug unit to be the primary on a certain drug case. Any more than I can send the lieutenant for the general detectives to be the primary on a burglary. It's their job to oversee the others. And then drug intake and tips. This dates to earlier in December than the December 15th cutoff that most of the other data shows. The tip button is one of the very first buttons on the city of Burlington's police department webpage. And what do we do with those tips? Well, we investigate. And when a tip comes in, particularly for a residence that is not supposed to be occupied, we will immediately respond and make arrests if we can. The picture at the right is a screenshot from one of our use of force videos that is on YouTube. It shows a person who was squatting in an empty apartment being arrested for that act. That person is known to police for more than 200 police encounters. There have been more than 50 since this June arrest that is depicted here. So this person was arrested, taken into custody, I believe lodged for this trespass but has had more than 50 encounters since then, including many more arrests. Drug houses, however, that are occupied lawfully by a tenant, even though that tenant is maybe committing unlawful acts, we do not have the same ability to go in and immediately affect enforcement action. That's gotta be something that takes longer. It is a more challenging effort. After all, everybody, lawful tenants have Fourth Amendment rights to those premises. Everybody has Fourth Amendment rights to their person and their effects. But with regard to premises, this gentleman had no Fourth Amendment rights to this premises. We do act on tips. We evaluate all the tips that come in. I personally get all of them. They also go to all the members of the drug unit. We consider a number of factors when we look at them and that includes our current caseload, whether or not we have people that can buy into the location, meaning do we have people that can actually purchase narcotics there? Some locations are very closed. They will not allow anybody they don't know and those are far more challenging to develop the intelligence and evidence that we need in order to pursue an enforcement operation. And then, again, our hiring. It was pointed out at the most recent public safety committee meeting that there's some differences in online numbers about what's being reported as pay. We've ameliorated that, fixed that. I instructed a recruitment coordinator, Bajwa, to do it. And she told me today that it had been done. So hopefully we have addressed those inconsistencies. But this is what we are currently offering. The $15,000 bonus is what was allotted by the city council from ARPA funds is nominally exhausted. And what I mean by nominally is that, for example, those new recruits that just got out of the police academy, they don't receive their first payment of it till they finish field training. Then they get another after year two and another after year three, and that's their 15. They haven't gotten that money yet, but it is spoken for because all of them are here. So the amount that was allotted by the city council, excuse me, is nominally spoken for and exhausted. We are continuing to maintain it. However, I'm gonna find however I need to find in order to continue to offer it. No agency in the country is not currently, well, I can't say that, but it certainly feels like no agency is not offering a bonus right now. The vast majority of them are, I see it all the time, fewer offering what we're offering and none in our region are offering this. It's a really important component of our continued recruitment efforts. That said, the next class, which begins in February of 2024 is probably only going to have one member from the Burlington Police Department. And that is not a good thing. That is off of our targets. The targets the mayor and I articulated in the rebuilding plan are at least five recruits per class and at least three lateral officers each year. So that's 13 new officers each year. We hit that this year. We got two excellent classes and we got more laterals than we had expected, a total of four. I'm still hopeful that we will be able to get additional laterals in 2024. I'm very hopeful for our August class in 2024. I think it will be six, but our February class is going not to be the numbers we need. And that is simply where we are as a country with regard to hiring and with regard to job availability has nothing to do. I cannot praise enough the work of recruitment coordinator, Rajwa and recruitment officer, Erwin. They are really, really working at this. And all of us are executive manager, Trammel has some excellent plans. We're working with our PIO and community engagement coordinator, Sarah Tim. And also our redaction specialist, Sean Shan Chen who is working on so that we can get collateral materials and video materials that can help us with our advertising. And we are still looking to find the right company to assist us in this matter as well. But our class in February is not going to be quite what we need it to be. That may be a slight blessing in disguise, however because for example, we have two new recruits who are gonna be on the shift tonight and we have no field training officers for them because the shift itself is so denuded. I think one of the officers who's holding over from day shift is a field training officer and may be able to take one of those recruits but the other recruit may not be able to be trained tonight. And that's a function of, as we get big recruit classes in which we need, we don't have the tools to actually necessarily train them as functionally as we have in the past. So all of these things are moving targets. Everything is more challenging as we try to rebuild with the staffing that we've currently got. But that was a very long chief's report. I apologize and I am done. Commissioner Rao. Yes, thank you so much chief. That was very exhaustive and very informative. I know other people probably have questions too. I have one question and one comment. The comment is about the solving of the crime of the three Palestinians, the case about the three Palestinian students. It was really, it was done in such a efficient and quick manner that I am, I'm thinking that perhaps you probably know this already but perhaps the detective can, I cannot say his name right. So help me chief, that he can be recognized for a national award perhaps. Just given that this case garnered so much national attention and how quickly it was done. So I'm happy to collaborate with you to nominate him for an award if you have in mind. And perhaps even the team, that's something to think about moving forward positively. I don't know if you wanna say a few words to that effect. That's a terrific suggestion. I'll look into what award would be appropriate and figure out how the nomination process goes and what those windows are. I think that's wonderful. I appreciate your saying that. I too think very highly of them. I think this is just a really, we've got an incredible detective unit and I'm very proud of them. And they are already hard back at work on. Great, I've looked at this and then sorry to interrupt you. I looked into some of the DOJ and I kind of awards that for community policing and for policing for communities our size. So I can share that information with you at some point as I look into it a little bit more. I'm happy to write a letter because they are asking for letters from the community members as well. So I can definitely think about that and you and I can work on that a little bit more. Having said that, my question is about the, and I heard you speak at the community forum as well about reporting tips. And I have reported a number of drug tips and most of them online. And I think at that time, this was of course two years ago and I'm one of those people in 2020, 2021 and 2022 who made multiple tips. And from the online perspective, and I don't know if that has changed since, the response was very strange. That's the only thing I can think of. It was obviously generated automatically because it was almost incomprehensible. And so I wonder if we can do something about improving the communication once a tip is submitted. I think that's my only question. Yeah, I'll actually look into that. I don't know that there, I'd have to check to see if there's an automated response. And if any of the other employees who happen to be watching could tell me, I'd seen Officer Coro's name, Detective Coro, rather Detective Coro is a member of that drug unit. Maybe he could tell me if there's an automated response. I don't think there is in the same way that there is for online reports. When you make an online report, you get an automated response with a number, but it's not a case number. It's just sort of an integrity number, an auditing number. And then what happens and was happening is that people would get a number that said this has been closed because an incident's been opened for it. And they would think that their case had been closed and it hadn't been, in fact, the opposite. The online was no longer just sort of sitting in an online limbo. It had actually been translated into a Valcor incident. And that's what that message was supposed to convey and it wasn't doing a good enough job. So we changed the language for that. That's for online reporting. I don't know what happens with drug tips and I will look into that. Thank you very much. Any other commissioners have any questions about Chief's report? Okay, I'll stop sharing and give you all the screen back and thank you very much for your time. Thank you all. And we can move to our next part of our agenda, commission business discussion on the draft copy of the police oversight charter change proposals. We have four speakers. We will start with counselors Stravers and Bergman who are co-chairs. Just a note to all the commissioners. At the end of the discussions of all four speakers, I request that the chief and all the commissioners weigh in as in Q&A or any comments that they may have. Thank you. Commissioner Stravers. Thank you very much, Commissioner Rao. Ben Travers, City Councilor from Ward 5. I believe I'm joined by Councilor Bergman as well. Are you here, Jean? I am. Great. So really appreciate the police commission having us. Councilor Bergman and I have co-chaired a committee on police oversight and accountability really going on about nine months or so here. This committee is made up of both the City Council's ordinance committee and the charter change committees. Our ordinance committee is made up of four individuals, myself, Councilor Carpenter, Councilor Shannon and Councilor Hightower. The charter change committee is made up of Councilor Bergman, Councilor Doherty and Councilor Carpenter. This Councilor Carpenter is lucky enough to be on both committees. Our joint committee was a committee of six, if I'm not mistaken. Thank you, Jean. Before I dig into the committee's work and Jean, okay, by you if I sort of take the discussion and then you can jump in. Yes, please. Yes, please. Okay, great. So before I jump into the joint committee's work, let me say I joined the City Council in April of 2022. This discussion with respect to expanded lease oversight and accountability is a discussion that's been going on since well before I joined the Council. Sure, many of us here will remember that in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd, many communities around the country were grappling with how to potentially reconsider their existing models of community oversight and accountability. The City Council at the time of which neither Councilor Bergman and I were members passed a resolution that would have placed a charter change question on the ballot to stand up a community control board of policing that in effect would have completely wiped up, achieved existing role over disciplinary matters and stood up a board of community members to step in on matters that they chose to in effect take control over. That charter change measure was vetoed by Merweinberger and that veto was not overridden at the time. The joint committee has a website that's up. There's many documents that are on there. One of the documents is the veto message that was received from the mayor at the time that proposed an alternative charter change measure that if the Council had gone in that direction would have expanded the role of the police commission over matters of discipline. But ultimately that's not the direction that the City Council went in. Rather there was a resolution that the prior Council had passed at the time that tasked the city attorney's office with drafting a new proposal with certain criteria. And those criteria are detailed. And again, if anyone is interested you can find the joint committee's website online and all these materials are posted there. But again, the Council passed a resolution that tasked the city attorney's office with drafting a new charter change and ordinance proposal that again would have expanded this police commission's role over disciplinary matters. After that resolution passed there was a change in the Council. Councilor Pergman and I among others joined the Council. There was some transition within the city attorney's office as well. I think in the minds of some in our community that process was a process that was taking too long which prompted some residents to place a proposed charter change question on the ballot last town meeting day. And that question in large part looked a lot like the proposal that the City Council had passed back in 2020 to stand up a community control board of policing. In a split vote at that time there was a resolution that the Council passed before our last town meeting day that made a commitment saying that if the charter change question on a community control board of policing failed that a joint committee would be created between the ordinance and charter change committees to keep the discussion on police oversight and accountability going. Last town meeting day, the question, question seven on the community control board of policing did fail at the ballot box which then triggered our joint committee to begin our meetings. As Councillor Rao and Councillor Cox knows from the very beginning of these meetings in addition to both the ordinance and charter change committees meeting jointly we've sent out broad invites to folks to join our joint committee meetings including this police commission including police leadership and the police union including each of the city's neighborhood planning assemblies including organizers behind the question seven that was on the ballot this last town meeting day among a number of diverse stakeholders. And I'm very appreciative to Commissioner Rao and Commissioner Cox and attending many of those meetings very appreciative as well to Chief Mirad as well as I believe we have Detective Coro here as well who attended our last meeting too. So very appreciative to the diverse stakeholders who attended our joint committee meetings as we've gone through this process. That process involved more than a dozen meetings and without going into too much detail I think it's fair to say that the first half of those meetings largely focused on what's the existing layer of the land? And I think many of us even on the city council were surprised to find or glad to find out what that existing layer of the land is. This police commission's authority the relationship that you currently have with the police department it exists in a number of different documents but from my perspective none of those documents are really our city charter and none of those documents are really in city ordinance. You have departmental directives you have a complaint process that former commissioner Shereen Hart and Chief Mirad had worked on which has been stood up. There's a mayoral directive as well that our Weinberger put out with respect to use of force incidents but none of these documents exist again in our ordinance and our charter. And I think our committee was glad to find out about the scope of the existing practices and where is this working and what more can we stand up to memorialize that. Again, the joint committee met over the course of a dozen different meetings or so I said the first half of those meetings were focused on what's the existing layer of the land and I think the second half of those meetings with the able assistance of our city attorney's office as well as outside council in Josh Diamond an attorney at the law firm of DINSEY put together the proposal that you see before you now. And that proposal in broad strokes is a proposed charter change proposal which if passed by the council would go back on the ballot this March and it touches on a number of different sections of the charter section 184, 185 and section 190 in particular. Section 184 and 185 are those sections of the charter that touch on the police commission's existing role. And I would say again, in large part, what's proposed in this charter change is memorializing what the existing practices right now. We talked some about the size of the police commission for example, there was some discussion about expanding the charter from seven to nine members ultimately landing on seven members is what you see in the proposal, which is what exists right now. There was some discussion about including some language about ensuring that the commission is representative of the diversity in our community. So you see that in the proposal as well, including that language in the charter itself. Turning to section 185, again, the proposal goes on to really reflect, I think some of the best aspects of the transparent relationship that this commission currently has with the police department. There's language in here that would require the chief of police to continue to furnish both the city council as well as this police commission with information with respect to the department business and on-goings within the department. There's language in here as well, which reflects the existing practice of, for example, if the department wants to stand up a new departmental directive, go to any departmental directive and you see in there that it's been signed off on by both the police chief as well as this police commission. But again, you see nowhere in our ordinance or our charter a commitment to that always having to be the case going forward. And so, to a point that councilor Grant, for example, made earlier, I agree that the discussion here largely revolved around disciplinary matters, but I think that's in part because there was general consensus among our committee that with respect to other functions like auditing and monitoring and the commission's ongoing role in terms of having a say in departmental directives, that of course we were, I would say unanimously in support of standing that up in our charter as an ongoing practice. You'll see in the language in the proposal as well, a commitment to the chief having to continue to keep the police commission informed and updated any time a community complaint comes into the department, a commitment to furnish the commission with answers to any questions you may have, documents and information regarding any questions documents and information regarding any complaint and any ongoing investigation. The proposal allows for an existing practice to continue, which is that if the chief has classified a particular complaint as being of lower medium level that they may dispose of that complaint before bringing it forward to the commission except having to update the commission as to the result of that. But for higher level complaints as the existing practice, the chief would have to wait until coming to the commission to offer their recommendation as to how that complaint should be disposed and to receive the commission's feedback on that before moving forward. It also stands up this process that once the chief has disposed of a community complaint that the police commission can make an alternative recommendation or other suggestions, which of course, whether it's exercise now or not, the police commission of course can offer its own recommendation or suggestions as to how a complaint should be disposed of and then the chief may choose to accept those recommendations or not. So in broad strokes, the proposal up to where I've reviewed right now reflects the existing practice that the commission has with the police department in a transparent process of sharing complaints, sharing information, sharing feedback and recommendations as to how these complaints should be addressed. What the proposal that's before the commission and before the council now would do in addition to what you have right now is I think from my perspective, sort of stand up a new process, which from my personal perspective would appreciate council Bergman's feedback on this too, would likely be a rare instance, but it's sort of a break glass in case of emergency that if for whatever reason the police commission wanted to conduct its own independent review or investigation into a community complaint, or if it had an alternative recommendation as to how a complaint should be disposed of if they wanted to have another body or another independent body consider how to resolve that complaint, the proposal before you all provides for those paths. And so if you dig into the language here where our joint committee landed is by a two thirds vote, and there was some discussion around this at the joint committee as well, should it be by a majority vote or by a two thirds vote? Ultimately the joint committee landed on a two thirds vote. If by a two thirds vote, this police commission decided that they wanted to conduct their own independent review or an independent investigation of a matter that they could do so and by doing so would be provided the resources and the personnel subject to approval by the city attorney's office if you wanted to bring in a third party to review it to conduct your own independent review or investigation. That's step one that would be added here. Step two is whether the police commission decided to exercise its right or not to conduct a review or investigation. There's a process here where if there's a disagreement between the police chief and the police commission as to how a community complaint should be handled by two thirds vote, the commission can decide to elevate this concern to a new three person panel. That three person panel would be selected by the mayor. A majority of that panel would have to be professionals with experience in law enforcement, human resources or labor and employment law. The third person on that panel would be a member of the general public selected by the mayor who ultimately would be able to reach a decision as to how that particular complaint should be resolved. Whether an investigation or whether elevating this matter to a new three person panel, again, both those matters would require a two thirds vote. There are two other items I will speak to and I know I've gone at length here but there's a lot in here and they would be happy for council Bergman to chime in on any other items. The two other items that you see in writing and the proposal that we're sent to you have to do with one, the chief's authority over matters within the department and then to an officer's appeal process if they wanted to appeal for many discipline that's been issued, whether by the chief or whether by this new three person panel that we're speaking of here. In terms of the chief's authority over the department, I will say that we regularly had representation in the joint committee from the mayor's office and the mayor since 2020 has expressed interest in changing the charter's language to provide that the police chief should have the same authority over the department as any other departmental head within the city does. And in effect, what that means is that the police chief would not be insulated from the mayor's directives in a way that's different from other departmental heads. You'll see again in the proposal that's before use and new language that in effect would make the police chief subject to the authority of the mayor as chief executive officer. I will say to you all that this is a matter that has continued to be of some discussion. The chief and the union has raised concern around this language as well in all fairness. And as you'll see in the memo that we provided to the council, we are seeking additional feedback in both the mayor's office as well as other stakeholders as to whether that language should remain in an ultimate charter question. The last piece that I'll mention is the appeal process. So as this commission may know, and I know it happens rarely, if a police officer wants to appeal from any discipline that's been issued by the chief at the moment, ultimately that's an appeal that comes before this commission. Because our charter change proposal expands the role of this police commission potentially over disciplinary matters from our perspective and from the legal perspective as well, there has been some concern, some due process concern that if this commission takes on a larger role over investigations or discipline, that an appeal of that discipline should not come back before this commission. And so the proposal that's before you all would remove the police commission's existing role over discipline and instead default either to the collective bargaining agreement, which is what would apply to any unionized police officers or to the city's personnel policies, which apply to other city employees at the time. Again, I will tell you that we've received some feedback from the department as well. Some concern about particularly for non-unionized supervisory members of the police department, what it would mean to change their existing appeal process. And I think the commitment that we've made is that the hope here would be that that appeal process for them wouldn't change from what it is right now, but by removing language from our existing charter on this commission having a role that will allow for greater flexibility to figure that out moving forward. A lot of information I've gone on that length here. Jean, I don't know if you have anything else to add in terms of what's in the proposal or the work our joint committee has done. Let me be really brief and first echo my appreciation for all the folks that participated including commissioners, the department, including the chief staff folks who reached out and anybody who participated in any way by email and telephone call, folks were engaged and I totally appreciate that. So I wanna echo that. The most important thing that I take away from this is that we are codifying the responsibilities primarily of the commission. There's a little bit of clarity in terms of the city council, but by and large, this is I think absolutely necessary to codify what in large part is already happening and then to the extent to where we're making changes in that it's in what is the city's special statute on police, the charter. So I don't really see the just leaving the status quo as being effective in letting the commission still operate under the ground rules that we already have in place, let alone move us. Let me make a final point on the new items. Well, actually to finish that off and what this does and what the language does is it authorizes the commission to do things. It doesn't require the commission. The commission does not have to take things, does not have to draft things, does not have to audit or monitor. Some of us might think you should, some of us might encourage you to do that, but this charter does not do that. So that's very important language in here. In terms of the dispute, what Councillor Traver said in terms of like dispute resolution when there is a conflict between the commission's opinion about how a complaint is resolved or otherwise in here. I mean, first of all, let me just say that this proposal doesn't go as far as I had wanted it to go. I was not, this is not where I had tried to get us to go, but I support this. I think that it is a reasonable, both compromise and an important move forward. And it is worth it for me to continue this process and continue to improve and to codify that. That being said, the dispute resolution between the commission and the chief, I think that it is, it lends an aspect of community accountability, which is absolutely important. And many of the criticisms that were leveled at the independent board are, I think, very taken care of in terms of the appointment by the mayor of a three-person panel made up of two people with the experience that was identified, as well as a member of the public so that there is both public representation generally and expertise, members of the public that have that particular expertise. And I think, and we heard questions of community trust, I don't think those went away in the last two years. And even though the independent commission was defeated and defeated well by a larger majority, there's still a large percentage of people in the city who voted for it. It is a significant issue that we have. This, I think, should help deal with trust issues when there is a dispute between the community body known as the police commission and the head of the agency, the department, the chief. So I think now the devil is in the conversation. So that's all for me unless you wanted more from me then. Thank you, Councillors, Travers and Bergman. I would like to proceed to hear everybody and then open it up for questions from the commissioners. I think that would keep the discussions flowing as well. Next in line 4.2 is Officer Coro who is the president of BPOA. I don't know if I see him, if he's here or not, Officer Coro, are you here recognizing Officer Coro? Welcome, please go ahead. Thank you for having me tonight. I appreciate being asked to speak just for some of you that don't know me. I've never really introduced myself to any of these too far. I've been in the police department for 12 years now. For 10 of those years, I've been a police officer. Prior to that, I was a community service officer. And before that, I actually was a beach and parks patrol, the yellow shirts that you see in the summertime. So I've been here for a little while and I've done a range of things throughout the department. I worked patrol for most of my career and currently I am in the drug unit as a detective. I did want to hit on one thing that was brought up earlier about the tip line just so you're aware. I'm the person that reviews all of the tips and actually goes through them and makes sure that you get a call back if you leave in your email or anything that you would like to receive a call back. I'm the one that goes back and does that. So I do read every single tip that comes through and I try to respond back and do the best that I can with that. So if you do send a tip in and you do put that you want to be contacted, I will reach out to you. So please know that it's not going into a void anywhere. No, I think you could respond to me by the way and we had long conversation. So thank you. Yes, yes. So that's just a little bit about me. I have a couple of things I'm just going to hit on this. I'll try to do my best to be brief. So this document to be very clear is on the right track. And I think we all agree that there needs to be some changes. I agree with both counselors, Traverse and Bergman that codifying existing practices need to happen. Absolutely agree with that. The issue with my, from my standpoint and from the union standpoint is just some of the language that is still in this document. So I'm just going to go over some of that really quickly. So just starting with just to be broad and just to be clear, I think honestly this document needs more time. I think that trying to push it into the ballot is going to unfortunately cause it to fail kind of as we've seen in the past. So my thought would be keep this dialogue open like you've done and actually bring in the members that you need to bring in to have this conversation even deeper than it's already been had. I only recently have I spoken about this and only recently was I offered that position to speak about it. I was given the ability to be invited to these and to attend and unfortunately due to scheduling wasn't able to attend but I wasn't asked to speak until very recently and wasn't asked for my feedback until very recently. I also didn't see the draft until very recently as well. So my thought and our thought is that if this could be not pushed to the ballot we think that'd probably be best unless there's some miracle in the next couple of weeks that the draft could be changed in a substantial couple of different ways then that would possibly be the case that it could make it to the ballot but I think you're pushing it to fail unfortunately. So the first thing I'm going to go over is the timeline with the new process. There's no clear timeline to how long this process would take and as I spoke in the committee meeting previously that's a big issue for us. This is already a really stressful process for any single officer that has to go through this. The investigation itself going through the investigation then rendering some sort of discipline you're now adding on multiple pieces to that process that increase that amount of time. So for example, what I'll make it really simple officer makes a mistake officer then is investigated for said mistake officer is then given discipline. At that point the chief's renders that discipline and at that point we would be able to as a union agree that discipline which we've done before and I would not agree that it's rare for us to grieve discipline especially to use the appellate board. We do that. That is something that we use more often than not and it's actually a lot of times it just doesn't get to that point thankfully that we have to do that but it's something that we do use quite a bit. So we do use that appellate board and that's why it's in our contract to use that appellate board but anyway, so if we go through this process as is your investigation generally takes should only take within 30 days to finish once that investigation is finished there's discipline rendered at that point we would grieve said discipline if necessary. If you add in let's say there's a super majority and at that point this new process is put in the place I don't understand how long that would take and I don't wanna see officers waiting three, four, five, six months to find out what is going to happen to them. These aren't little things for officers. This is either we're talking suspension possibly depending on the discipline we're also talking termination depending on the thing that happened. We don't know which way it's gonna go and that's the scary part for officers. This is their livelihood. This is what they do and it's very scary to not know if you're gonna have a job in three months. There's already a ton of stressors as you all know in this job and that's just one extra stressor and it's very, very hard on officers. You may or may not, we may have different agreements on how things have ended for some of these cases but I've seen this as officers because I'm intimately in all of these cases as a union member and I see officers that can't sleep. I see officers that physically are sick. I see officers who they just want it to be over and adding more time to the process is scary for them because they don't know where it's gonna go and adding more time just means that they're gonna be stressed out more and now you're putting that officer back out on patrol. If it's not a serious self-offense that they need to be on some type of leave while it's investigated, you're putting them back out on patrol with all that extra stress. So my big thing here is that whatever the timeline is going to be, it needs to be clear now, not later in an ordinance. You would need to be clear in the charter that there is a specific timeline that will be kept with and I think reasonably you would have to keep that within that 30-day window. That's my first thing. From there, the independent panel, the issue with this is it becomes very cyclical but I've been asked to offer feedback for it. So I will, I think the panel needs to be bigger. I said this at the committee meeting. Three is too small. I think five would be better. I've been asked to weigh in on what that panel should look like. The current language is very vague. It just says, I'll pull it up real quickly just so I get it exactly right. But sorry, had it in a dropped away. So appointed on case by case basis by the mayor, members of the independent panel shall include two persons with experience in law enforcement, human resources or labor and employment law or other similar experience and one member from the general public. This is very vague. I don't know what experience in law enforcement would mean. And then to be clear, it's not even just that. It could be somebody with human resources or labor and employment law. I think it needs to be clear in the way and one way that I would make that clear is if you make it a five-person panel, two law enforcement officers with at least 10 years of experience, full-time law enforcement experience, one attorney with experience in labor law, one member who has human resources experience greater than five years and one member of the general public. I think that is at least kind of a guideline and a starting point. I think you'd probably want to dive in a little bit more into all of that. But that is what we would like to see for the independent panel. As it comes to the mayor having a role in discipline, that's a chief's role. There's no need for the mayor to be involved in discipline. The mayor is a political figure. The mayor is going to cave, unfortunately, to public and or political pressure. And that should not be in any place when it comes to somebody possibly being terminated or receiving a substantial amount of discipline. And I don't see a place where this makes sense and that we can support it as long as the mayor is in the role. Yes, we understand that in all the other departments in the city, that the mayor has a different role. But this is the police department. It's a very different animal in general. And we all know that. We know it's done very differently. There's a lot more higher stakes. There's a lot more reliability. There's a lot more to it. It's not a place for the mayor to have a role in discipline. That's the chief's role. And as I go back to, as I said before, in the previous committee meeting, why does that change need to happen? I don't see the issue currently that we're having with that. So other than that, those are my big things. Yeah, those are our big things. I mean, currently, unfortunately, with the way the draft is written without those changes, we will not be supporting this if it goes forward at all. Chair Rao, could I just ask for clarification on the last point about the mayor having no role in discipline? Is that the section, where is that section? Is that the 185A subject to the authority of the mayor? Is that what you're talking about? Yes, counselor does. Okay, thank you. Okay. Thank you, Officer Coro. If you would please remain because I am sure commissioners will have some questions for you as well, because I'm going to continue with our next speaker, counselor Shannon. I don't know, I don't get it, I don't see you, but if you are here, please, this is your time. So please go ahead and make your comments. Thank you for including me, I really appreciate that. And thanks to the others who have gone over this in great detail, so I will try to be brief. It was my hope that when we went through this process, we could have done it more collaboratively with the police union because I don't think that this is something we want to seem like we are being oppositional or imposing something without their engagement. And unfortunately, while they were included, as was the police commission, they were sent notices that we were having meetings, they weren't actively engaged until I think I sent Officer Coro the draft and asked him to come to a meeting to give us his input. And I know that both Chair Chacuntala, Chair Rao and Mary Cox also came to us, but as you know, as we're in the process, it's very hard to comment on this work in progress without kind of going to all of the meetings and you're trying to represent a group of people that you have to go back to. Same was true for Officer Coro. It wasn't to participate throughout this process would have been difficult. So we heard from Officer Coro at our last meeting and it was at a point where we had to warn it or forego the opportunity to get this on the ballot. And some of us were concerned that this was not ready for prime time but didn't want to preclude the possibility of us being able to make the changes that are needed so that it would be able to go on the ballot because as others have said, I do think there's value in what we're doing here. I think that there's broad agreement on codifying what you all have been doing kind of by agreement that it would be very valuable to codify that. The specific concerns that I have are the investigatory authority which I think that we thought your body wanted but I am not sure that that's actually true and I'm very concerned. I don't think we really thought about the timeline in whole until Officer Coro brought that forward but sometimes we think that this oversight is one directional that the commission would always want a higher penalty than the chief was administering but it actually goes both ways and lengthening this process can actually delay discipline that needs to happen. It can cost the city a lot of money while somebody stays on that maybe should not be staying on. There's some value in having closure and a timeline and this kicks the timeline to an ordinance but we never went through an exercise of like what is even possible in terms of a timeline if you add a duplicative investigatory process and what I think might be more valuable is a monitor to review the investigation that was done so that the commission would be in a better position to evaluate the investigation and give their input in a timely way rather than opening up a new investigation. I also agree that the mayor having the authority to discipline officers go over the chief's head to discipline officers is a bad idea for I think the officers deserve professional oversight and the mayor is a politician. There are other elements in here that have been careful to make sure that the oversight is professional and maybe we haven't fine tuned that the way we should but I do think it's very important that our officers be able to rely on the fact that their discipline will be by professionals who know their profession. And lastly, the appointment of the panel, the union had said they would prefer five to three. I voted for three, but that's really only because to appoint for the mayor to a point five that's going to, it takes some time to pull people together and there is a timeline problem. We had asked the union, we didn't have time in the committee to deal with this and we had asked the union to come back with a proposal about what that panel might look like. And I think that if there were certain positions that were automatically on that panel, like the director of HR or like the police chief that those positions are automatically on there and you don't have to pull together this group of people that some of them are automatically included. I think that that could work to have a panel of five and give greater clarity as to what the professional criteria should be. So it was, I think our hope that the police commission might be able to weigh in with your opinions on these matters, you're the ones that are really dealing with this much more closely than any of us who came up with this proposal. And give us the guidance that we need so that we can address what the committee didn't have time to address before we had to warn us. So that's all I have. Thank you. Thank you, Councillor Shannon. And thank you everyone actually for some very thoughtful comments and just general discussion about this proposal which hopefully all commissioners have had a quick chance to look at. I'm going to start with asking Chief Murat to weigh in and he'll be sort of the last speaker, so to speak. And then commissioners can ask questions and address and express their opinions. Chief. Thank you and I'll try to go quickly. I think that both Councillor Shannon and Detective Coro said a lot. There are absolutely incidents in which police discipline is necessary and subject to the restrictions in the law and collective bargaining agreements and human resources privacy, the public or its representatives have a right to know about those incidents. I fully agree with transparency and accountability which is why I've tried to share more data than any chief before me and why I make every single use of force public. It's why every single citizen complaint currently goes to the police commission. And I also believe the decisions about disciplinary matters must have as much input as practical including from citizens or their representatives which is what the police commission is from experts like the director of human resources or the city attorney. And I also believe that as the elected head of the city's administration the mayor should have input as well but not final authority. And to the extent of these proposed charter changes memorialize the documents that we have created for the past three years I am in favor of these changes. And those documents include the mayoral executive order of September, 2020, which requires that the police chief consult with the mayor prior to making decisions which requires that the mayor be informed of certain kinds of incidents. And also the other document is the role of the Burlington police commission in reviewing complaints against BPD employees which was adopted in August of 2020. So September, 2020 for the executive order and August of 2020 for the Burlington police commission agreement. That said, everything that does do what it can to consolidate and to memorialize those decisions I take Councillor Travers's point which is that these things exist but they are in two different places or more than two that they're not necessarily created with the force of law. That said, I strongly object to the proposed addition to section 185 the clause that in the context of quote the direction and control of the entire police force and quote makes the chief of police quote subject to the authority of the mayor as chief executive order officer and the ordinances and orders of the city council and quote and that is not because the chief of police is free from those issues but in the context of the direction and control of the entire force this clause in effect obviates every other recommended change because the clause means that there's no need to use the phrase chief of police in these documents at all because every decision ultimately becomes that of the mayor. Did I just accidentally hang up? No, I just lost the phrase, the frame I'm sorry. So why is this a problem? Well, the primary problem for me is that although it is not among the sections of the charter that are being addressed by these proposed changes there is a very important charter section that applies to the police and only the police in the entire city and that is charter 191 political activity restricted. No person while an officer or other member of the regular police force of the city shall publicly endorse any candidate for political office serve as a campaign assistant on behalf of any candidate for political office or perform any public campaign activity on behalf of any candidate for public office for which Burlington voters are casting ballots with the exception of members of the collective bargaining team of the union. What does this mean? This means police are supposed to be and must be separate from and away from political pressure. They may not exhibit political pressure. They need to be insulated from it as well. This is also a problem I think this language in 185 because if the mayor is making the choice rather than the chief of police then when the police commissioners disagree with the disciplinary decisions that the commission is disagreeing the commission is disagreeing with the mayor not with the chief. Every single part of this document becomes an issue of the disagreement between the mayor and the commission not the chief and the commission. And that is the same mayor who would then appoint the three person panel that will hear the disagreement. That said, I do believe that the charter is improperly unclear on who disciplines the chief of police. And I think that the charter should memorialize that it is the mayor who has disciplinary authority over the chief and not the police commission so that the rest of these parts can work. This pertains to receiving, investigating and finalizing complaints against the chief of police. And that's currently partially stated in 190B, section 190B which in the recommended changes becomes 190C. But I think that the authority needs to have additional clarity particularly as the commission's authorities are being expanded in other sections under these recommended changes. Okay, thank you chief. This is the time for commissioners to weigh in but it looks like Councillor Travers has a question or a comment. Councillor Travers. Yeah, thanks. If I could just briefly come back to a couple of points before turning it to the commission. I greatly appreciate all the comments that we've heard from folks this evening. And I think there's really sort of four comments that we've heard from folks that from my own personal perspective, I think our items that we can likely deal with. A majority of our joint committee understood the time constraints that have been referenced here in the proposal before you all, it talks about that being left to ordinance but I think people understand that this is not something that should linger on for some time and that those time constraints should be shortened. And if we need to put that in the charter to get broader support from my own personal perspective, I think that's fine. A majority of the joint committee felt like this independent panel that we stood up should be a majority made up of professionals like another professional regulatory body. If we need to move from three to five to garner additional support from my own perspective, I don't think that should stand in our way here. And frankly, even to the point that the chief just made with respect to whether or not the mayor or the chief should ultimately have an ultimate authority over discipline and control of the department. I don't think that that's the biggest question that ultimately would be placed before voters if we pass this charter change. And I think that's probably an item that we can work out. As I mentioned before, we are seeking some additional feedback from the mayor's office as well to confirm where are they in terms of that particular question. And to the chief's last point there, we did try to include some language if it needs further clarification, I think that's fine to make clear that if we were to pass this charter change that the commission would have no role over the discipline of the chief and ultimately that would be the mayor. So I think those questions can all be dealt with from my perspective before it turning to you all. And I think the bigger question that would be on the ballot is whether or not there should be an alternative method to have a police commission which is made up of resident members independently review or investigate a complaint and whether or not if this commission differs from the opinion of the police chief, whether or not there should be a three person or five person panel that stood up to me, I think that that's the more substantive questions where we'd love to hear this commission's feedback on those bigger questions. So thank you. Thank you all. Any of the commissioners wants to start with their comments or questions, please unmute yourself, recognizing commissioner Oskie. Thank you and thank you all for coming tonight and sharing your thoughts. Generally, I am okay with the direction this is going in and we'll be fine if some of the concerns that were raised or addressed. But one kind of fundamental issue that seems to be there's a maybe a misunderstanding about these complaints that we receive. Sometimes they are internal, internally generated. We had, we heard an appeal of a grievance, a appeal of a disciplinary matter last week that was entirely generated internally. It was not a citizen complaint. It was a complaint that, you know, that that was the police that the, it didn't generate, it didn't come from the citizen complaint. Most of our citizen complaints, the majority of them don't result in disciplinary matters. They are really learning opportunities. People don't like their interaction with the police or they're confused about something that happened. And it's hard for anybody to know what those complaints are because the content is all shielded from the public. And this isn't something we're gonna be able to resolve with this charter change, but I think that at some point it would be helpful if we could better define what complaints are, if we can have different levels of complaints because I wish that we could communicate to the public more about some of the concerns that are raised, dispatch was confusing, dispatch was rude or I thought I was supposed to, they never showed up and I wanted them to show up. And these are citizens that are complaining and it'll be helpful I think for the public to understand the role that we engage in and the role that the police department engages in resolving these complaints. But because they're all shielded from the public, there is no transparency there. It's just something that continues to bother me about this process. So there are some issues that we deal with that are not citizen complaints and there are some that are citizen complaints. And the majority of time that we spend are on these complaints do not result in any kind of officer discipline. They're more like, we need to do a better job at handling certain concerns, certain, or we take a better look at our policies and procedures and maybe tweak things. And that's the sort of process improvement that is a good outcome of the complaint process. So I don't really have, maybe that's something that we can deal with internally or maybe that's something that we can work on alongside this process. But that's the one area here that of the citizen complaints that has really been nagging me. It's not that, whatever process you guys come up with, I don't have a big, I think this is going in the right direction and the details you can work out and I'm happy to live with them. I'm joining Commissioner Oskine saying that I heard several counselors speak to codifying what we are doing. And that's exactly what I had hoped more from this proposal. The proposal as it stands, for me at least, doesn't codify what we are doing but taking it farther than I had expected it, far farther than what I had expected. So in that sense, I agree. I think we can work on the complaints process. I also have concerns about the independent investigative aspect of it as well because I'm quite moved by what Officer Cuoro just said. The timeline, as it is, many in the commission will testify with me that we are already short in terms of staff, in terms of our own time to spend many hours or days just to supervising an independent investigation. It's not going to be that easy. I mean, we're not going to just say, oh, let's do it over a cup of coffee for half hour. No, this will require our time commitment, our expertise. And I just don't want to do a shoddy job. On the other hand, Officer Cuoro is saying it's unfair to those officers to sit around for days and wait for us to get to it when we can. So I'm really compelled and quite troubled by the fact that we will be now in many ways looking at this alternative disposition and be responsible, by the way, according to if I'm understanding, right, be responsible for hiring this independent investigator. So for me, in terms of just workload, it's not feasible. I mean, I'm just gonna come out and say it's not feasible for us to do this and balance the concern of the officers. If we don't care about the officers, okay, we can take 12 months to do this. Right now I'm really concerned about what Officer Cuoro said and I'm not hearing too much, at least I didn't hear in the opinion statements how that can be addressed. So I completely understand Councillor Gravers respectfully that he understand that that is an issue. Several people have their hand up. I will recognize first Councillor Cox and then, no, Commissioner Cox, Councillor Bergman and then finally the Chief. Thank you. Thank you. I just had one question at the outset for Detective Cuoro, which is, how does the Police Officer Association view the process that is currently in place of the commission hearing appeals from discipline by the Chief? There we go. So we agreed to this process through our contract negotiations. We have no issue with the current process as it stands and we think it works from the many times we've used it. Thank you. I'll reserve further comment until I hear some of the other questions and so on. Councillor Bergman. I just wanted to briefly comment on Jessica's big concern and that is to say that you've got under this proposal greater clarity with regard to directives and rulemaking by the commission. And what you're talking about clearly, I think, would give you the right to develop that policy. It doesn't do that, but that's what the charter is meant to do, right? Is to give you the framework with which to do that. And I'd have to like switch my screen to look in terms of the workload, just now switching to Chair Rao's concerns, mostly about the workload, which is I think that there has been great support for the commission to get the resources, including a monitor to be able to do the work because we have heard loud and clear the call that has been made. And let me just quickly look and see and maybe Councillor Traverse has that, well, whether we've got that in here, I'm not sure that we do, but that is clearly something that is a function of the mayor's budget and the resources that you get for legal and for other staff folks. And that's really outside what a charter change can put in, but know that the concerns that you've raised are in terms of workload have been heard. They've been heard by me and I know what they've been heard by Co-Chair Traverse. And I think by the entire six members of our joint committee and there was one final point, I've lost it, so you're lucky, you don't have to hear me. Chief Murad and then Commissioner Garrison. Thank you, I just wanted to point out that since Commissioner Ransky brought it up, that grievance involved the commission overruling the decision of the police chief and the determination of the police chief. We have a system that works, it functions. I think it was fair for the officers and I think it was a system that has the ability for there to be that kind of review and due process. Commissioner Garrison. Thank you, I just wanna thank everybody for all the hard work you put into this. I haven't been involved in it all that much, although I've gotten some emails on it and some information, but this is the most information that I've reviewed since you guys have been meeting. So to be honest, I don't know where I'm at with this oversight. I wasn't for the last one that got voted down. And I just think it's too much oversight and I don't even think it's gonna be used that much. I mean, I think last year we probably had one grievance. This year we had one grievance. So it seems redundant to me, but I really do appreciate all the work that you put in it. I don't want you to stop, I wanna be a part of it. We'll send it out to the voters, we'll see where it lays. And it's something the citizens want, I'll get behind it as well. So I guess that's where I'm at right now. Thank you. Commissioner Cox. So I just wanna say that with respect to this independent panel, I'm in agreement with Detective Caro that I think it should be more people. And I think that for sure it needs a certain, some number of professional police officers with professional experience. I think that it's sort of like the NTSB. It's like you wouldn't have people that have just never even been on an airplane as members of the NTSB. And I think that if you're evaluating how somebody teaches, you wouldn't have people that have never taught as members of a panel evaluating what they've done or it's like the, have none of the members be have ever taught. And that's a concern to me. My general feeling is that the process was well intended. But I think that not enough of the stakeholders which would be more people from the community, the police officers, the commissioners, all of the table earlier in the process. And so I would think that holding this thing over for another year would make more sense so that we could get something that was really good. I'd like to speak also to this issue of the monitor. What the commission agreed to was an administrative role for a complaint monitor. And specifically, we specifically discussed it specifically like in the preamble, it was to have somebody do the task, the administrative tasks that Jack Keep does by himself currently in terms of collating all the information but he sends it all to the whole commission. We all look at the videos, the interview transcripts. It gets discussed during executive session. It's not something where commissioner Keith alone is evaluating the sufficiency of the complainant. He collates the information. It's an administrative role but it's unfair to have him doing all of this extra work. And so we did ask for a, not only do we need administrative support for the commission to do things like website support but we also need somebody to handle all this complaint activity to just collate the information, get it out to the commissioners, make sure everything's there, that sort of thing that somehow has been misread by the joint committee to be that either we wanted a monitor that would be evaluative or an investigatory and that's not what we had agreed on. What we agreed on was just an administrative role. And so there's some things that I think that are worthy of like further discussion that we just really didn't have a chance to sit down at the table with the joint committee like with the chief mirad and the officers association and other members of the community from all aspects of the community, not just the loudest voices but other people from the community and have conversation about what seems to make sense. Thank you. Okay, thank you to the commissioners and the counselors. Do anyone, does anyone else have any other thoughts or questions that they may ask the counselors or Officer Coro about this? Okay, oh, Commissioner Hansen, sorry, I missed you, go ahead. Thank you, Chairman Rao. I've been listening carefully to this whole discussion and I am new to the commission obviously so I haven't had the experience of seeing exactly how everything works but I did attend what turned out to be a three hour meeting of the Joint Ordinance and Charter Change Commission and I listened or group, I listened to all of the very many ideas that were there and what struck me about that is that this is not ready for a Charter Change. I think there's some good ideas and a lot of work that has gone into this but a Charter Change is a big deal. I mean, it's kind of like amending your constitution and I feel like at this stage of the game if something was gonna be going on to some ballot for people to vote on and then we're gonna take it, let's say it passes and then we're gonna take it to the legislature, we should have had our ducks in a row by then and I don't think that there has been, I've heard many people say that they just feel like this needs a little more input. I know I have tons of questions about it. I'm a big fan of this book, The Art of Subtraction and I think too often I know I try in my own world to think about not always just adding but taking away so that we can focus on what's important and I would hate to see us rush through a process and create a ton of process that even the people who are working on it say oh maybe we'll never use it. Things that are not used generally don't go well. People have not had enough practice with them. I'm very aware of Commissioner Oskie's point that I think we need to be thinking as a police commission about how we build transparency and how we reflect to the police department what our community wants from the police department and this is a volunteer board. I mean, I'm brand new to it and I'm like holy cow I cannot believe how much is asked of a volunteer board and I think that we need to spend some time thinking about what we want our commission to actually do and work on. I mean, if you want to have people on this commission that work two jobs, have child responsibilities at home, need to cook dinner, need to work a night shift, you're never gonna get commissioners that can put in the kind of time that this kind of a charter change seems to anticipate. And I'm also mindful of the fact that I just sat here and listened through the chief's whole presentation about how short staffed they are and how important it is that we keep all of the officers that we have and hopefully that all of them are doing a good job and that we have a process to address that. And I wanna make sure we have a good process to address that, but I wanna understand exactly what that process is, both in the police department level and on a state level because there's state process around this too. We don't wanna have an officer that's worked for Burlington that didn't do a good job and just gets passed off to another police department somewhere. If the person is not abiding by policies or not treating people fairly and rightly in the community, that there's a state entity, the criminal justice training council that looks at whether that person should be certified as a law enforcement officer. I wanna understand how that process interacts with this process that we're discussing. And I guess the big point I'm trying to make is that we shouldn't be doing anything that hinders folks like Detective Coro for wanting to work for the Burlington Police Department because there's such a small pool of law enforcement officers right now and the best ones are gonna have many, many offers, right? And we want those officers to stay with Burlington. So when I hear Detective Coro say, this could create a lot of uncertainty or angst or problems for our officers, I wanna know if we're gonna ask something of them like that, that we are getting something that we really need in return. And I'm not convinced that this is gonna do anything. Add value. I'm not convinced that this is gonna add value and I wanna be sure of that. I wanna know more about the processes that are in place and I wanna make sure we're not doing anything that interferes with our ability to recruit and retain good officers. So I guess I don't know what you're looking for Commissioner Rao. If you're looking for a motion, I mean, I would make a motion if folks were amenable to that to have the continue to work on this proposal. And I think that our commission needs time. We really need time to spend with it and to think about is this actually codifying which is important. I agree with that. Is this actually codifying what we're doing and is what we're doing the most valuable use of the limited amount of resources that you can expect of people on a volunteer board because I wanna spend time looking at substantive change at reflecting back to the chief like this is what we want in a police department. I don't want to be involved in micromanaging the police department. I don't think that that's effective. I think city council has seen that it was a disaster when they tried to do it. And I don't want to think that that's something we wanna continue to support is micromanaging. I think we want the chief to run the department. So. Thank you. My question is I don't think we need a motion at this time though you are, you can certainly introduce one. I think this was more just a Q and A and at some point if we want to return to having an actual concerted discussion, I would like to have that separately and a different in the January or February session that might be a more productive way of doing that rather than now that we have had a time to listen to everyone and I do agree with you that I think we have to be careful that we are not moving too fast. One of the things that we actually agreed on as a commission we talked about was to retain our appellate process, the appellate aspect of the work we do. So that those are some of the things and clearly there is some disjuncture here or you know, something we can probably work on in the future. Councilor Travers and then commissioner Oski. I thank you. I just want to reiterate very grateful for all of your feedback this evening. I agree with the points that were just made by commissioner Hanson. I think everyone else on our joint committee does as well that we certainly don't want to do anything that's going to take us a step backward in terms of addressing our recruitment of retention issues at the police department. However, from my perspective, I think the proposal that we brought forward here is not all that out of line with what you see with some surrounding communities. You know, if you look to Winooski for example, if you look to South Burlington, if you look to Shelburne in Essex, their disciplinary decisions are actually made by their city or town manager, a political appointee selected by their city council or their select board. In South Burlington, for example, if there's an appeal from any discipline that's issued by the city manager there, it goes to their city council. And so, you know, I think here, what if we had come out with a proposal here that takes disciplinary authority away from the chief altogether and gives it to the mayor and then had the city council step in to hear appeals from any of that discipline. I don't even think that we would be here right now. That would be dead on arrival. So I think that we've worked hard here to come up with a compromise. Again, appreciate all of your feedback. I think there's some additional work that can be done here as reflected in the memo that we've circulated to the council. We're soliciting this feedback and appreciate it this evening. I do just want to say one other thing though, which is that, you know, Burlington is very much so a lean in community. I think it's what makes Burlington an exceptional place to live and be. I've yet to see a single issue where anyone has said there's been too much public comment on a particular matter. That's not something that you see in Burlington. And so appreciate the feedback with respect to additional input. I do just want to mention though, as I mentioned in the beginning, you know, this is a joint committee that has now met for well over more than half a year. There's been hybrid meetings, both in person and virtual options over a dozen different meetings. The invites to this meeting, most committee meetings that we had as a council just go out to a regular warned meeting group. Co-chair Bergman and I were very careful to ensure that direct invites to every single one of our meetings went out to every single one of the stakeholders that I mentioned up top and really appreciated the diverse input and feedback that we had from folks who came to each of our meetings. And so, you know, I certainly understand that schedules and lives of professionals and of volunteers don't allow for participation every meeting. But I do think that we've gone through a concerted effort here to ensure that we've received as much public feedback as we could over these meetings, including again, by standing up our own dedicated website as a joint committee that lists all of our materials there. And so, appreciate all the input here. Appreciate all the input to come as well. So thank you. Thank you, Commissioner Oskie and then Commissioner Cox. Thanks. I was just wondering Commissioner Rao whether or not Commissioner Keith, I know he couldn't be here tonight, but did he provide you any feedback that you might? No, he did not. No, he did not. I did ask him and I haven't received anything as of now. So that is a good question that we don't have in this conversation. Commissioner Keith. He's the one that handles the complaint process, manages it for us. So thanks. Commissioner Cox. Yes, I just wanted to say that I think that a couple of the things that are really working really well have been illuminated by this. And then a couple of the things that we really do not wanna do or don't have the capacity to do with an all volunteer commission have been added in even over our objections and description of why this won't work that they've been added in. I just think that what I'd really like to do is can we please hold it over so that we can flesh out some of this information because I don't understand like it's the joint commission not understanding our comments. Could we make them more vociferously or work like with better data to support what we've been saying but it is an all volunteer commission. And I personally don't think that citizens should get involved with deciding on discipline of officers. That should be decided by the chief. I think that him advising us what decision he's made is useful. I think that the chief advising us on his disposition of complaints is useful. There's provisions in the complaint policy that was adopted by the commission that works. There's a couple of provisions that I think don't work but those could be worked out with the chief. I just, I ask sincerely, can you please not take this up and go back to the drawing table understanding that there's provisions in there that just are not workable and you're taking away things that do work well. And so this is not making sense to me. Thank you. Thank you, commissioner Cox, recognizing commissioner Hanson. I'm thinking that the timeline that this is under at this point is not gonna allow us to weigh in unless we make some sort of motion tonight. And I'm very mindful of what commissioner Cox is saying who's had a lot more experience with this group than I have obviously but I am troubled that this might end up going to voters to vote on when I just don't see it as being ready. And so I guess I'm new to this process but I guess I would make a motion that we continue to work on this and that it rest with the police commission now for a period of six months to allow us to get the input from the police association that we would like to have or other police officers to get input from the commission members, the ones who have not had a chance to weigh in yet on this and maybe we can try to figure out what we think is actually important for this group to do. So that's sort of a long motion but I guess I'm making a motion to take all of this good work that's been done and now have the commission spend the next six months working and figuring out what's important and what should be in this proposed charter change. Okay, so I second that. Okay, well done. I just wanna get this, this is the recommendation, right? We can only make a recommendation to the city council or the joint committee that they wait for six months. Am I understanding this correctly? Commissioner Hansen, we request, we request that we'd be given an opportunity to work on this to continue to do the good work that has been started and to get information on other items that have been raised tonight and to rewrite and come back to the joint committee with a new proposal. And I think given the amount of time that it will take to do this, I'm very hopeful that we are gonna have some sort of resource to help us do all this work. I think we need someone from the city attorney's office that could help us than somebody who is also an administrative assistant. So I guess I'm relying on Councillor Bergman's comment that that's gonna happen because I do think we need that in order to do this work. So I think the motion, if I am understanding correctly, Commissioner Oski, maybe you can help with the language a little bit. I won't be supporting this motion. One, I think that a lot of work has gone into this. The city council has spent a ton of time on this and I'm not sure that we have the capacity to do more work in this area. And we've got plenty of other things that we need to deal with in the next six months. And this means it wouldn't get on the ballot until next November at the earliest. And the original resolution suggested that this would have been done a lot sooner. I think the public wants change. So I don't think that this is the role of the commission to write its future. I think this is the role of our elected officials to make these proposals. So I can't support this motion. So, okay, well, there's this motion. So I'm trying to work the motion as the chair so that we can vote on it and move on. I know Commissioner Garrison had his hand up too. So the motion is to, I'm just gonna write it down quickly. The motion is to recommend that any discussion or any proposal be returned to the police commission or be sent to police commission for deliberation and changes, suggested changes. I thought I heard Commissioner Cox say, that you have a second. Am I right, Commissioner Cox? Yes. Okay, so there is a second on this motion. This discussion, Commissioner Garrison. Oh, I just wanna make a suggestion that we don't vote, don't add a time as far as like how long we gotta work on this. I don't think we should put a time period on this. Okay. We can also table and help me out here, Commissioner Oskie. We can also table the motion for further deliberation. Can we vote on that? The motion has been seconded. So in order to table the motion, I think someone would have to move to table the motion and that would have to be seconded, I think. Or we can vote on the motion and see if it passes. Right. I think we can go ahead and vote on the motion. I mean, if there is nobody, unless there is a motion to table it. Can we add the language again with the motion? Okay. I'm struggling with the language. It sounded like maybe Commissioner Garrison was asking for an amendment to the motion to not include a six month time period. So maybe you're asking that the ask the maker of the motion who is Commissioner Hansen, if that would be a friendly amendment or not. And if she's agreeable, then the motion could be changed to just say that the commission is gonna at some point weigh in on this. I would agree with that amendment to not have a specific timeframe, but simply to give the commission sufficient time to work on this. Do have suggestions, okay. All right. I think we're ready to vote, accepting the friendly amendment, all in favor of this, say aye or raise your hand. I think Commissioner Cox, yes, okay. The motion passes four to one. So that's, I will write up the recommendation and forward it to the, because I haven't really written down and I'm gonna work with Commissioner Hansen to write down the get the wording, generally shared with the commissioners and then send it over to counselors for you to deliberate and take it into consideration, okay. Unless people have any other questions, I think we, this completes our discussion tonight on agenda and commission business, unless other people have any questions, we can move on to agenda item number one, counselors can stay for the rest of the meeting or they can leave, including Officer Coro. Thank you all for coming today and speaking to us, we appreciate it. Hey, any, the next agenda item is use of force reports from October and November 2023. Do anybody have any questions or concerns about the use of force report for October and November 2023 if you have had a chance to look at them, review them? Any questions, Commissioner Cox? I'm sorry, I don't have any questions. Okay, Commissioner Hansen? Just a question and more of a process point. I know that there are a lot of incidents lumped into this and I just wanna be careful and clear that I would not be in a position where I could review any incidents that involved something that was, potentially going to go to criminal prosecution and it's a little tough for me. I just kind of skimmed through that report to know if there's anything that I need to be recusing myself from. So I just wanted to mention that because I think maybe if there's, I don't really know what you normally do next with this but I don't feel that I could be involved if any of them are sort of high level incidents and I couldn't really tell that from reading over the reports. Yes, thank you, Commissioner for notifying us about that. The process usually is that if there is a complaint that we want further information about, we ask the team to sort of either talk about it or additional material. That is usually the process. I don't have any concerns. I quickly looked over both the October and November data. I mean, one of the things that we are working on and hopefully we will continue to work on is, which I believe from my perspective is true is for us, these use of force reports are not sufficient. We would like to continue to convince BPD and the BPOA to release the body worn camera footage to us along with the use of force reports. So Commissioner Hanson, that's what we are hoping to achieve in the next few months is that we negotiate that and we have access to that. Otherwise for me, these use of force reports are really, I'm reading them. They make perfect sense. They're well written, they're well presented but I really, from my personal point of view, need more information. So that's something I just wanted to tell you about that because that's what we are hoping to get. We used to have those, but we lost access to that information and we would like to have that information back. But anyone else has any thoughts? So Chief, I thought your hand went up. It did, and I raised it electronically as well. Just as a point of information. So for, and welcome, Commissioner Hanson, thank you for joining. What I'd like to sort of clarify is that any incident that involves a citizen complaint would involve a review and this body would be able to see anything it wants that is not otherwise protected by law, like a juvenile or something that has a matter of that. When there was a period in which only a handful of uses of force were being requested, there wasn't an objection to that. It was when the body began to ask for all of them just as a blanket and say, we wanna see all of them, that there was an objection raised by the union that it constituted an audit, a random audit because it wasn't anything about the uses of force that was driving the request for the video. It was just all and any and they had an objection to that. We were working through that and I'm hopeful that we can come back to a place where everybody's able to see what they need to see in order to understand and have confidence that our written reporting is accurate and fair too. That behooves all of us ultimately because I certainly don't want, I want a representative body of neighbors to be able to say, yeah, we do not see discrepancies between these written reports and the things that we're allowed to see even if everybody else can't see them. Some incidents do get reported, do get released online via Nvidia but only those that have certain parameters, certain things, so it's not random. It's specific incidents that involve either the use of a tool like a firearm being pointed or pepper spray being deployed or that involve a serious injury to the person or that are for whatever reason believed to be to have significant public concern. And so those get released online for anybody to view and in any of those instances if the commission were to want to see other things other than what's online, I don't think that we would have an issue with that but it was sort of the request for all body camera that caused this new ripple that is being worked out with the BPOA and the city attorney and the commission. Thank you, Chief, Commissioner Cox. Yeah, I was wondering, we don't currently do this and I don't know that there's a mechanism for doing this but I've been pretty concerned every time that an officer gets injured during the course of interacting with a suspect or in an incident. And so I'm always like rushing to send emails off to Sarah, Tims and say like, are they okay? And like what happened? I don't ask really what happened but I ask like, are they okay? But I was wondering if you would have any motivation towards reporting on, it's not use of force incidents but it's incidents where use of force, someone else use some force or against an officer. Do you see what I'm saying? What the difference is? I don't know if you had ever thought about that or? Yeah, I mean, I think certainly anytime an officer has significant injury, I tend to make that a press release of that. I'm grateful that that doesn't happen very often but I mean, I receive anytime an officer is injured I receive something called a first report. Well, if the officer does one and every officer is supposed to. So if an officer is injured, even in a very minor way they are supposed to do a first report of injury that goes to our insurer so that we can begin the process should a claim ultimately become necessary. The vast, vast majority of the time that is not the case but I see those and I respond to every single one to the officer double checking with whether or not they're okay. If you would like some sort of report from me about incidents in which officers were injured that didn't necessarily use involve force on the part of the officer. So they therefore are not captured in our monthly use of force reports and did not rise to a level that occasion to press release. I could try to endeavor to do that. I certainly wouldn't be doing every single one but I mean, I could inform you of things. One of our brand new officers was he was spat on by a subject in brightness face in his eyes that's a crummy thing, it's no fun. It happens to police officers and firefighters. I could report on something like that if it were of interest to you because I don't believe that incident. I don't remember for sure but I don't believe that incident involved any use of force on the part of the officers and rise to a level of injury. Yeah, I'd hate to like add anything to your workload but if you capture that anyway then maybe like at the end of the year, something like to say, oh, we had so many incidents of whatever, if you're already capturing that data I don't want you to have to start a new data capture. Well, we captured, as I said, there are these first reports of injury. There must be some way for us to sort of say how many have come in and I certainly could add that. I have been expecting sort of to try to in addition to doing the data that we do on a monthly basis and coming up with a final year tally so that we know exactly how many mental health issue calls there were this year and how many total incidents there were this year. I was also gonna try to come up with some other categories of incident and this not rather categories of data and this might be one such category, first report. So I'll see if that's something that I can find over the next couple of days and give you a sort of a tally for how many first reports of injury officers did and then I'll see whether or not it can be disaggregated with regard to things that are sort of on duty and operational versus things that are on duty but we're training or officer stubs his toe inside the precinct as opposed to getting spat on by a subject. I don't know if I can, but I'll take a look. Thank you. Okay, thank you all for, so if I'm hearing it correctly, one has any concerns or questions about the use of force reports so we will continue for next month. We also did not receive any commendations from the citizens. So I don't know if we received any or not. We haven't, they were not forwarded to us chief. And of course we are happy to read any commendations but we didn't receive any. So just to let you know, so. I'm not certain, I didn't, I don't recall seeing anything direct to me. I'm not certain if Shannon saw anything or sometimes come to Sarah Treve and or to Sarah Tim. And so I'll see whether that happened but I don't have any for you right now. Right, and we did not receive one directly either because sometimes we do receive it directly but we didn't receive any. Okay, that concludes our general meeting. Is there a motion to move into executive session? Yes. Commissioner Oskie. I move that the commission find that premature general knowledge of grievance pertaining to the Burlington Police Department would clearly place the commission in a substantial disadvantage because the commission risks disclosing confidential information relating to potential disciplinary action if it discusses the grievance in public. Is there a second to that? Well, can I make a friendly amendment? Or is that before or after the second? Because this doesn't have to do with the grievance. This just has to do with hearing a complaint. That's under the statute. That's what we have to work with. Grievance is one of the reasons for there's complaint under the statute is not a reason to go into executive session. So I thought it would be discipline. It's a grievance. Okay. Okay. Is there a second? I'll second. Okay, all in favor. Going into executive session. Place your hand. Commissioner Garrison. All right. The motion passes. We will be entering executive session. No, no, no. Now I move that based on that finding of substantial disadvantage, the commission enter into executive session to discuss grievances under the provisions of one VSA section 313A1D and one VSA section 313A2. Okay. Is there a second to that? I second. All in favor. Say aye or raise your hand. Okay. Motion passes. We will enter executive session now. Am I correct, Commissioner Oskie? Yes. Can we take a five minute break? Yeah, we will not return. I just want to make sure we will not return to the public meeting after executive session. Is the link in email? I didn't see it before we started. Yes, it is. It's right after, it follows the public meeting link. So we'll see everybody there in five minutes. Thank you so much, everyone. Okay, bye.