 or adopt the agenda. Commissioner Keefe has made a motion to adopt the agenda. Is there a second? Commissioner Comerford, any discussion of the agenda? All those in favor of adopting the agenda, as is, kindly raise your hand. Nose and abstentions, there are none. So it passes unanimously. We are going to start then with approving the minutes from the January 31st meeting of the commission. Is there a motion to, sorry, just one second here. Is there a motion to approve the minutes? This was for the special meeting in January 31st. Motion to approve. Commissioner Comerford moves to approve the minutes. Is there a second? Commissioner Garrison seconds it. Any discussion? All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Abstentions. Commissioner Oskie abstains, she's not here. The second minutes to approve are from our regular December 20th meeting. Is there a motion to approve the minutes? Commissioner Keefe made the motion to approve and Commissioner Comerford to seconded that. Is there any correction or any discussion of the minutes? Okay, great. All in favor of accepting the minutes? And one abstention from Commissioner Oskie, correct? Great. Great, that closes those items. I would like to just take a moment actually, which I had meant to do when I started to introduce our newest commissioner, Jessica Oskie. Welcome and thank you so much for joining us to do this work. We'll have a lot more opportunity to talk and catch you up. Thank you. So the next item on our agenda is 3.01, the public forum. Are there, is there anyone who would like to address the public at this time? Please come right up. Thank you. Commissioner Grant, by the way, is on Zoom. Welcome, Commissioner Grant. Would you introduce yourself? Yes. Thank you for having me. My name is Romeo von Herman. I work for Green Mound Transit as the stations and customer services supervisor. And today I'm here as a private citizen and not necessarily an employee of Green Mound Transit to maintain some level of, how do you say, clear balance as to why I'm here. I have been in contact with commissioner Milo about my presence today regarding the safety that GMT employees face at the transit center. But more specifically my experience of an incident that happened January the fifth around a little bit after five, just before 6 p.m. This kind of correlates to what's been happening lately on the buses and at the transit center as well as all the way in honestly in Montpelier. As my personal experience as a private citizen, an incident happened at the transit center which I did report to the police department. And this incident was what I at the time thought was a child trafficking that might be happening at the transit center. And so I did alert to the dispatch and call them. What happened initially was based on within my capacity as a transit supervisor at the station, one of the customer alerted me that she's been harassed by another mail customer over there. And I reach out to the mail customer and did find out that at the time he was intoxicated and not necessarily responding to my questions as to what he's doing. Then he was with other individuals along with a minor at the time. And I did try to speak to the minor to see if everything's okay based on the way the minor was acting at the time. The minor failed to respond to me as an individual and my colleague was with me there the transit security coordinator. And him and I agreed that in the presence of a minor with intoxicated individual and that there was a female that reported that she was also being harassed. It might be prudent that we do contact PDP just to kind of check on the minor more than anything else because it looks like the male individuals that were there were walking on their own two feet. So they didn't necessarily need immediate medical assistance on the spot. In that regard, I did contact the PDP Brown to police department to convey what I was observing at the time to let them know, hey, there might be a minor here that looks distressed, unresponsive to my questions if she's okay, you know, I asked the gentleman that was there, hey, is this your child? And the one of the gentlemen claimed that he's the stepfather. And another individual that was within the vicinity said, we're not necessarily sure he's the father or the stepfather. And then I did inquire, where's the mother? And he said, she's somewhere out there. So once we kind of had that conversation and I speak to the security coordinator, I say, you know, it might be prudent that we just call the PDP and have to check on the kid, like I said earlier. So when I did that, and I call them, initially they respond favorably and said, okay, where's the individual? What does it look like, who he is and all that stuff, all the information that they require. And I did ask them, well, they did ask me, what bus is this person supposed to be taking? Cause he was getting to about 6 p.m. We have our next departures from the transit center. And so I did tell them that, hey, this is gonna be boarding the Winooski bus, heading towards Winooski, number nine Riverside Winooski, and he'll be departing at 6 p.m. along with the other individual plus a pit pool that is present as well. So they said, yeah, could you guys hold the bus for us when I called the dispatch? And I said, we can only hold so much because there are other people on board. We don't hold everybody our way. So we agreed on that. And then within, I'd say a minute, maybe two tops, a female individual called, returned my call back and left me a voicemail, basically give me the go-ahead that, hey, let them go, they can go ahead wherever they're going. And I was at that moment furious and I felt there was a little bit of disservice as to the reason why I called and the fact that they made a split decision quickly to let these folks go without having to even check on the kit, if anything else. So at that moment, I called back the dispatch and I said, hey, I need to speak to the officer that left me the message. And they said, yeah, sure. So I spoke to the female officer if I can find the voicemail that she left for me. So just at least for disclosure by the name of the officer. For the officer said that, yeah, we understand what's happening. You can let them go ahead. We'll try to send somebody to reach to the vehicle. And I said, if we let them go, then that's pretty much the end of it. Nobody's there to check on the kid. And she said, yeah, we know it, just let the vehicle go. And at the time, honestly, so much emotions was going through me because I think from the side of that child, what if it's me at 10 year old or whatever and maybe something's going on and so nobody's coming to my aid and if I was being trafficked and nobody even cared for it, what would that mean to me as a child that comes from a war-torn zone? And so much was rushing through my head at the time that I was like, this cannot be really happening. And I just felt at the time they were taking very lightly the issue. And I called back again and I said, can I speak to the officer? And the person that picked up the dispatch said, if you have a complaint, you need to leave a voicemail for a complaint. And I said, look, I'm not even in the mood to leave a complaint. I need to speak to somebody who can come and just check on the kid. You guys asked us to hold the vehicle, we held the vehicle. Now you guys are telling us to release the vehicle. And this is just, it's not the way to do it. So, I mean, the way I'm doing now is much more mellow. At the time I was a little bit more upset and so much emotion is running through my head. And I just felt let down more than anything else, just not for me, but for the child. And looking at all the incidents that are happening would like the attempt of kidnapping on the bus as well as the stopping in Montpelier to other issues that literally happened a day ago with two more people. It just made me feel like, okay, I mean, now they're responding now maybe because of what happened in the past. So, I did reach out to the mayor's office as well as the assistant, rather the acting chief to let them share my concerns and how dissatisfied I am with what happened. And I believe that he, if you refer to the commission, Milo get back to me and said, hey, why don't you come in and we'd be happy to ask you some questions about what happened and you can tell us more. So, that's why I'm here today. Thank you very much for that. I'm going to just turn to commissioners here to see if anyone wants to ask any questions or follow up commissioner Comerford. I don't have a question, but I do want to say thank you for following your instinct. Thank you. Thank you. Mr. von Hermann, I'd like to ask you to just to clarify, you said that you sat down with the mayor and the chief. No, I never sat down with them. I sent an email, both of them, to share my dissatisfaction of what transpired and the fact that response was, at best, none, at worst, basically being told, hey, stop calling us. You know, and so that's why I reach out to them via email and, of course, the acting chief did respond. And I'm not saying that our law enforcement are bad or they're not doing their job service the right way, but the way the whole situation transpired at the time, I felt it could have been done much better. I felt it could have been, at least they could have said, hey, look, we get that there's a minor involved in this situation and we will at least have somebody come and take a look at it or maybe even send somebody from Howard Center or somebody within the community liaison team member just to kind of check on the child more than anything else because for us at GMT or even as a private citizen, we put safety and customer comfort ahead of everything else. And when we have a minor in this case, we have to even go much more further than that and I wanted to convey that message to them and we're like, hey, yes, we do provide transportation, but we have customers who are vulnerable in a vulnerable stage and we want your assistance in this matter where I think you guys are capable possibly of sending a community liaison officer or somebody else, even if you guys don't wanna show up in pursuit or whatever, I just felt that the time there was a lack of almost, I mean, there was basically indifference to what I was even telling them and that just made me much more concerned that, hey, maybe if I call in the future and something is actually happening, they'll probably not even take it seriously. So yeah, that was my biggest concern more than anything else. And now that we have the commission who are, because I know the community is asking for an oversight board to come and see what the department is doing or the judiciary in general is doing, I am genuinely satisfied with what the commission is doing and the fact that you guys are looking after us, but I would like to see more done in terms of department response to vulnerable citizens or residents when they are in a difficult situation where it might not be able to be seen as like, yeah, that's happening, but there's a tell-tale sign that this is actually happening where we always told, if you see something, say something and when we say something and we're just treated in almost like an indifferent way, then it shuts people up. And so you know what? If they're not gonna say anything, they're probably not gonna respond in the future if something happens to them. Thank you. Commissioner Garrison. Hi, thanks for being here today and thanks for your civic duty. I was just wondering, did you ever get any feedback as to the end result of your complaint? No. From the department? No, not at all. I do understand that they were doing a little bit of investigative in the background where they did ask for some videos as to that effect, but as far as direct outreach to where I was at and what my thought process was or what they could have done in the future better was none of it. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Mr. Ron-Hara, I just wanted to make a comment in case you didn't know and also for people that are watching. So if a complaint is filed, that complaint also comes to the police commission. The department will investigate and will then report to the commission about how it wants to respond to the complaint. So there are parts of our process that are confidential and can't be done in a public meeting, but I did want to assure you that the commission will review whatever investigation is done by the department and weigh in on it. So thank you so much for coming tonight. I appreciate it. No, thank you. I do thank you for what you're all doing. I know it's part of the civic duty. Like they say, it takes two to tango. And so I'm just glad that you guys are there to help us out to go through this process. Thank you so much. Thank you. Hi, I have a quick question for Mr. Ron-Hara. Miss, yes, yes, please. I just wanted to have a clarification of something that you said. You said that you were told to stop calling. Correct. And at what point did that happen? It happened after two to three, maybe even four calls to the dispatch. The dispatch person kind of got pissed with me and it's like, hey, stop calling us. At that moment is the moment I was like, okay, this isn't going anywhere. And this is the moment where I was like, okay, I need to just air my concerns to the mayor as well as the, what do you call it, acting chief, Murat. Okay, thank you for the clarification. I just wanted to be clear as to what happened there. Thank you again for your service and being willing to talk about what you experienced. Thank you, Commissioner Mela. Mohamed, are there any people online that would like to speak during public comment? Yes, we have one speaker online. Her name is, their name is Deb. And for anyone online wants to speak, please raise your hand so I can see you. So Deb, I was able to find you and I enabled your microphone. You can speak now. Okay. Hi, can you hear me? Okay, thank you. I just had one question and one comment I wanted to put out there. I wanted to tune into the meeting today because I'm trying to really educate myself more on this ballot item number seven and what's going on with the police commission and Mohamed Ibrahim. I didn't know you were the one moderating the call, the people online, but I had seen his post on Front Porch Forum last week. I guess it was really going at great lengths about all the changes that are in the works for the police commission and giving it more power and all that. And I honestly hadn't heard anything about that. Maybe it was my ignorance. I've been trying to keep informed, but it was extremely helpful. And so my question is, am I ignorant not having known about that or have you not tried to publicize what you're doing because I found it very enlightening and important to know. So I have that question as to why you haven't done more publicity around this to let everybody know the positive changes that are in the works and some of which have already happened. And my second is just a comment to follow up with the previous speaker. I presume you made your contact with the police during the workday. I just wanted to let folks know, I understand about the shortages. I understand, it's hard to get good people, whatever. But I happened to call on a Sunday afternoon at 4.30, not 9-1-1, but just the police line because I was going up North Avenue and I could see this man with a bicycle and like a child trailer on the back where another bicycle was hoisted in there and he was pulling, it was clearly stealing a bike. Walking up and it was by, I mean, I shouldn't say clearly but that sure is what it looked like. And it was near BHS or the former BHS. And so I just wanted to let them know, hey, if there's any officer on patrol who could just swing down here and check this out and let them know. So I called the number and I don't know if any of you have tried to call during off hours, but it took at least 10 minutes to get through the answering message with all sorts of information. And then before I could finally push a button to speak to someone. And then again, I got a person who again was totally uninterested and asked multiple questions of me that I get it if it had been, what's he look like, what's he wearing? When I said he's right down the block, he's right here, if somebody would just come if they can but the person was clearly not interested and I'm sure nothing ever happened. But I guess my comment to that is to reinforce what was just said about the dispatch and maybe especially on weekends. And also if you might look into that recording that you get when you call the department presumably off hours, maybe it's like that all the time. That's what I wanted to say. So thank you. Thank you, Deb. We don't typically engage in back and forth during public comment, but I appreciate your question about the information we provided about the work of the commission. We provided that. We do convey what the commission is doing to the city council and the mayor. You make a good point that maybe we should spend more time although commissioner Grant is at NPAs talking about this but we did feel that with the ballot item coming up there was a lack of clarity about the role of the commission and hence that information. And thank you for your other comment with regard to dispatch and we'll come back to that. Commissioner Grant. Thank you. And thank you Deb for your question and concern. As commissioner Seglino just said, I have been attending NPAs and one of the things that we've talked about overall was as a commission has been community outreach, community outreach for the department, community outreach for the commission. I think this is a great opportunity to let Deb know and to remind everyone else that our meetings are filmed by town meeting TV. They have a YouTube channel. And if you don't have the opportunity to watch the meetings live and the live meetings can be accessed by going to the city's website, clicking on calendar. And then the calendar comes up for the upcoming meetings. And when you click on a meeting that you're interested in and it's not just city council, it's all the commissions and the city council committees. You're able to see the dates, the time, the physical location and also have a zoom link. But if you can't see the meetings live almost all of them are recorded by town meeting TV and can be viewed within 24 hours on their YouTube channel. So just to let you know that so that you can access it you can watch the whole meetings or you can watch them a little bit at a time whatever works with your schedule. And our minutes for prior meetings are also posted on the agendas as well. But thank you for your question. Can I just make one quick follow up? We're over time, I apologize, but feel free to email us and I'd be happy to share that. Thank you so much. So on to the next agenda item, which is 4.01, the chief's report, which is posted online. The chief is not available for this meeting. I thought I would point out a few things from the chief's report that are useful. One is that there have been, there are now 65 officers from 61 a couple of months ago and they're the number of community service officers that is officers that are not sworn officers that don't carry guns but that are adding to the capacity of the police department is now up to six but they anticipate hiring 12 within the next several months. And with regard to community service liaisons who do a lot of work with regard to mental health calls, there are now four and they're anticipating that to go up to six. There's also some information with regard to incident volume and this has been a topic of discussion at the commission and the data are just for the beginning months of the year, year to date. And what we see is that there's a slight increase, there's an increase from 2022 but overall the incidents are actually about 30% lower than they were in 2017, 2018, 2019 and even 2020. And while the incidents that happen are deeply disturbing, it is good news to see that. And for those of you who have access to board docs, you can see where the changes in incidents are compared to previous years. Do any commissioners want to make any other comments on the chief's report? Commissioner Grant. Thank you. I just want to note that while overall incidents are down compared year to date, we still have the issue where certain incidents continue to trend upward, larcenies, mental health, the overdose number is very high comparatively and stolen vehicles. These I believe are really related to our very unfortunate drug crisis, stolen vehicles. We've had some very mild weather but we've also had some very cold weather recently and there's just this incidence where people go out to warm up their cars and then you leave your car alone. And that is how vehicles are, many vehicles are being taken. So just a reminder to the public to be vigilant. Do not leave your car alone running with the keys. Don't leave keys in your car. Please make sure to lock your cars. People who are desperate are looking for something easy. And so the unlocked vehicle issue, cars and vehicles definitely continue to be an issue. I don't want to victim blame in any way. I just want our community to be aware that this could happen to you and just taking some simple precautions could help reduce this. Regarding the other things, we definitely need to have a plan to address this crisis in a more substantial way. Thank you. Thank you, Grant. Moving on to item 5.01, nomination of a co-chair for the commission and just to remind folks that in the past, the commission has had a chair and a vice chair. For a variety of reasons, the work of the commission has really increased and we have felt that having a co-chair would make the job more sustainable for us as volunteers. Commissioner Gamash was co-chair until he resigned and so we are in the position to elect a new co-chair. And I will take the liberty of nominating Shikuntala Rao as co-chair. I'm gonna ask if there's a second to that motion. Commissioner Garrison. And let me just say that I appreciate that Commissioner Rao is new, but she has dived right in and is really has enormous energy and has already been very helpful and has the time that is needed to do this. And so I, with great confidence, nominate her for this position. Last to ask if there's any other discussion or any other nominations. In that case, could I ask for a vote on this motion? All of those in favor, please raise your hand or say aye. Any no's, stentions, passes unanimously. Thank you and thank you very much, Commissioner Rao. Do you wanna say a word? Yes, thank you. This is working, I just wanna make sure. Thank you everyone. I respect all of you in thinking that I can jump into this and thank you, Commissioner Seguino. I'm still in the learning mode, right? So I'm gonna reach out to each of you and ask many, many questions. I think I already have sent everybody many emails asking lots of questions, so I might continue to do that. The only thing I would add here is that Commissioner Seguino and I are working towards developing some blueprint of how to co-chair responsibilities in a more documented way. So we have been talking about establishing bylaws. We are one of the commissions that is a pretty important commission but does not have any written bylaws. So again, as we write that together, we will submit it to the commission so that we have more kind of codification of how this sharing will work. But thank you everyone. Thank you very much. Moving on to item 5.02, introduction of Zoey Portless City Data Analyst. I see that Zoey is online and I just want to, hi Zoey. I wanna just preface this by saying that the commission each year receives a report from the city data analyst with regard to traffic stops, arrests and use of force and overall policing matters. It's a highly data-driven report and Zoey is our new city data analyst that will be providing us the report this year as I recall it will be coming out in May because of her recent stepping into this position. So in any case, Zoey, I wanna welcome you. Thank you so much for coming tonight and feel free to share some thoughts with us if you'd like to and maybe tell us where you're coming from. Yeah, thank you. It's good to meet you all. So about me just briefly, I'm a recent University of Vermont graduate with a master's degree and I was really excited about this position because I saw it as an opportunity to use my data skills, my visualization skills and communication skills that I've developed over the past few years to improve our community. And so as you said, I only just recently stepped into this role at the beginning of February and it has been vacant for a few months. So top priorities include that police report. I think it's very important and I'm very excited to build on what the previous two reports have gotten to you and also updating the open data. So things are updated for the public to see. And additionally, I'm very excited about working with other members of the city, such as through COMSAT or the Community Justice Center to help improve the community through multiple ways. So thank you. I look forward to working with you. Plant biology. Plant biology, okay. And you had to do some statistics for that, I'm sure. Yeah, yeah, definitely. Great, thank you. Any commissioners have any questions, comments? Welcome, Zoe. Thank you so much, Zoe, for being here and thanks all so for working with us on this. Commissioner Grant, very briefly, because commissioners. Yeah, I just wanted, yeah, quick question. I just wanted to make sure that we get her contact information. Yeah, we'll definitely do that. Thank you. Thank you. Item 5.03 is establishment of a format for reporting and reviewing complaints. So let me introduce this item as well. One of the challenges that we've had is our work has grown, has been tracking complaints. It ends up being a very complex process because there are many iterations in the process of reviewing complaints and reporting to the commission and hearing those. And Commissioner Keith was generous enough to take this on when he joined the commission. And I wanna thank you for the document that you produced for us that we got for this meeting, which is exactly what I was hoping for, which lays out in one document all of the complaints and the status of those complaints. Because it is challenging for all of us as a volunteer board to keep up with these materials, I thought it would be useful to put this on the agenda, to hear from others on the commission if there's anything else that would be helpful for us in reviewing complaints and seeing if Commissioner Keith would be willing to adopt those or we could get him some help to do that. So when I ask anybody for input with regard to the process and any changes we might want to the process of preparing for executive session and reviewing complaints. Commissioner Comerford. Just to thank you, I find it very accessible and intuitive and helpful, thank you. Commissioner Raul. Yes, I concur too. It's very helpful when we can have that summary, especially that you prepared as well for all of us to review right before we go towards the discussion, so thank you very much. I think, I don't know if we need to adopt that as a motion that we can just sort of go ahead with that. Okay. Yeah, I think so. Anybody else have any other requests with regard, Commissioner Keith? Well, you're all very welcome. I'm glad it was of some use. I would like really to thank our clerk, Mohamed Ibrahim, for uploading all of the documents into SharePoint. I think that was a really important, great improvement. And just one thing that maybe we could discuss with the big overall tracker, if there might be any way to embed links that commissioners could then just go to the tracker and then maybe just click on a link and be taken right to the files. I don't know if that's... Yeah, definitely. We can work on that, yeah, sure. Great, yeah. And I also want to thank Mohamed. He did incredible work putting our SharePoint together and Commissioner Oskie just for you. All of our complaints are now uploaded onto SharePoint and every complaint has a folder with all of the relevant documents in their investigative reports, Officer Affidavits, whatever it is that we need to review the complaints. So it is now all in one place. Thank you all so much for this. It's a huge improvement. Yes, Commissioner Cumberford. Can I ask a little about the security of the SharePoint site? I worry about that a little bit. It is secure, only we have access to it. It's actually very similar to the SharePoint at UVM where our departments have documents on SharePoint like tenure documents and so forth. So it is secure. Thank you. Okay, we have a time certain intervention by City Council President Karen Paul, who is here right now. I think that it makes sense to move to her intervention now and come back to 5.04. And I apologize, Shannon, for making you wait. Let me actually check with you, Shannon, to see if that's okay. That's absolutely fine, thank you. Okay, thank you very much. City Council President, we invited City Council President Karen Paul to come here to talk to us about her thoughts and discussions about the way forward with regard to civilian oversight. She shared some thoughts with us in an email to the commission and I thought it would just be useful for the commission to hear from you directly and to see if anybody had any questions for you. So thank you so much for being here. And also, Chair of the Public Safety Committee, Joe McGee is also here, who's part of this process. So thank you both so much for being here. Thanks so much, Chair Seguino. Don't know how it is that you managed to run your meetings so well that you were running ahead of schedule. Councillor McGee, when was the last time that we did that? He'll let me know. I just wanted to say first of all, it's a treat to be here. Thank you so much for asking us to come to your meeting. And since I do have the opportunity first, just wanted to congratulate the newest member of your group, Commissioner Oskie. And I just wanted all of you to know if you didn't know that when Jess came before the council, the council, it was by unanimous vote, including the mayor. And I think actually for a good many of you, it was by unanimous vote, which I think, to a large degree, speaks to the support that the commission has from the council. We appoint you and we are here to support the work that you do. Speaking of work that you do in the past two or three years, and I should preface this by saying that once upon a time, a long time ago, I was on the police commission. And the police commission that I served on and the one that you serve on are two very different places going from in the last two or three years to a commission that was advisory and to a large degree, very routine to the commission that you have created. You have really created today. When I say tireless work, I don't think I've spoken with any of you who have ever said to me, oh, the work that we do, that was exactly what I thought it would be. It's a lot more than I think you all signed up for and you have taken that responsibility, taken it seriously. You deal with a lot of reviewing complaints, you deal with a lot of confidential material. I have never once had any reason to doubt that you take that with the utmost seriousness and high level of responsibility. And thank you, thank you for all that you do. It's an enormous amount of work. I don't think anyone has. Most people, most sit in the citizens would have really no way of knowing the amount of work that you put in. And as part of our commitment to supporting your work, I think it's in the last year have had independent legal counsel which we have advocated and supported. And I think there are other resources that you need and we need to hear more from you so that we can do more to support those efforts. I am, I'm just here and I'll let, I'll let Councilor McGee speak as well to just answer any questions that you might have about any of the actions that the Council has taken on civilian oversight. You all come back to me, but certainly I'm glad I didn't know until a short time ago that Councilor McGee would be at the meeting and want to give him the opportunity as Chair of Public Safety. We are actually the Public Safety Committee as well, but to give him the opportunity to speak as well. So just a moment. Thank you, President Paul. I didn't really come with anything to say other than echoing the thanks that President Paul just shared. It's been great to work with you all as Chair of the Public Safety Committee, advancing so many of the changes in the CNA report and also supporting efforts to get the Commission more resources so you all can be as effective as possible in this work and certainly look forward to having this conversation about where we go from here in terms of the role of the Commission and looking ahead to Town Meeting Day and beyond in terms of how the Commission might interface with any new civilian oversight body that might be stood up. So thank you. Commissioner, President Paul, could I just pose a question then that I think might be what is on folks' mind? So of course the ballot item will be voted on, number seven will be voted on Town Meeting Day, even if it passes, it still will be some time before that would take effect. And so my question is related to the resolution that was passed in 2021 and how you envision us moving forward. As you know, in some ways, the Commission is in a bit of a limbo because certain authorities were given us but that hasn't been turned into an ordinance and as I recall, you said that there would be a process coming that you were advocating for with regard to input from the Commission, building on the resolution and some other input. Maybe you could just describe that to us again and answer questions if the Commission has further questions. Sure, I'm happy to. So yes, in fact, we are in an odd situation now and that to some degree was part of the odd situation that we found ourselves in even in 2021 for those who were on the Commission at the time and even for those who weren't, a great deal of effort went into the October 2021 resolution that was sponsored by the Public Safety Committee. It was myself, Counselors Hightower and then Counselor Stromberg and we spent a lot of time on that resolution. It passed, I think it was 10 to two and the idea was to bring that forward and as you all know, we got to a certain point and then unfortunately the city attorney then left and we were left in a bit of limbo in terms of that should have been the priority and that did not become the priority because of just simply the level of limbo in the city attorney's office. They went from six attorneys to three and it created the need to really be not as proactive more just simply doing the work that absolutely had to be done when it had to be done. That being said, it is a, I mean, if certainly if nothing else, the charter change that we're gonna vote on has conveyed I think to this community and I think there is a strong voice in the sense that this must be acted with urgency. We can no longer just keep on talking about it or studying it. If the charter change passes and we'll go to the legislature, certainly it will take some time until it is acted upon, if it is acted upon the potential for it to go through committees, go through the legislature, go through the governor, even come back from the governor. It's a long process and in the meantime we need to try to figure out what are we going to do in the meantime. It would be my hope and I'm only one, I should say and certainly most of you know the city council does not speak with one voice and I am just one of right now 11 and soon to be 12 city councilors but it certainly would be my priority to move forward on the ordinance by that being the priority to come out of the city attorney's office to take the response that you had given back in 2021 or actually it was actually April or May of 2022 and start working on finding the path forward. You gave very detailed, a very detailed response and that response deserves a response and that would be my top priority regarding the ordinance. Whatever we can do by ordinance, I believe that we should. I don't know, do you have anything more to say? Yeah, I think acknowledging that the, if the control board passes on town meeting day that we will have a significant amount of time even if it makes it through the legislative process to actually get that board stood up and ready to take over the responsibilities of oversight. So I would welcome the opportunity for the public safety committee and the commission to work together on a process for that, preparing for that board to be stood up and ensuring that the commission has the tools and the resources that they need, that you all need to do that work in the interim. I think, if the control board passes, we're certainly gonna have to have several conversations about what the role of the commission will be and what the role of the board will be going forward. So, it's definitely gonna be a long road ahead but I think we are prepared for whichever outcome we see on town meeting day. Great, thank you. Commissioners, does anybody have any question or comments for President Paul or Councillor McGee? Commissioner Comerford. I wanted to say before that we have to give kudos to our fearless leader, Commissioner Seguino, who has been an exceptional leader in this process and I think all of us feel jointly grateful for her leadership and the time that she expends in the process. So I'd like to be thanked but I also wanna give due where due is due. Thank you very much. And now I have a question for you. My question for you is supposing it doesn't pass, how quickly are we gonna get the resolution passed or the whatever it is, the ordinance? Well, so there are, so on February 6th, we passed a resolution, it narrowly passed, it passed, is it six to five? Yes, passed six to five. That sort of laid a path forward for how we would deal with oversight and accountability in the event that the ballot item doesn't pass. And that would set up a process. I mean, the first thing that I will be doing on the day after town meeting day, if it does not pass is to reach out to the chairs of the Charter Change Committee and the Ordinance Committee as per the resolution and get moving on this. As I said before, we don't wanna act with haste but I think after working on this now for two years, I don't think haste is going to be the issue. I think conveying tremendous urgency after a long period of time is really incumbent upon us to act and act now. And the resolution does lay out a very ambitious timeline, but if we really prioritize it, we can get this done by June. So that is the goal. And after the 31st of March, we will reorganize as a council and whomever, not only that we will have new counselors, but also whomever that council president may be, I will certainly be doing everything I can to make sure that this becomes literally our top priority. So that's where I stand with it. Thank you, because I think it's very important for smooth sailing going forward, that we have true clarity. Thank you. I agree. I agree. Any other commissioners have a comment? If I might make one, President Paul, even if the battle passes that long delay suggests to me that actually the city council should begin working on revising the ordinance immediately in any case because of the uncertainty of its future and the legislature and so forth. Yes, I would agree. And I do hope, and of course this is, we're getting a little bit ahead of ourselves, but I do hope that if the ballot item passes, that there will be an attempt in the legislature to really give us some direction. We're at the start of a biennium. That means that this could go on for some time. And in the meantime, if it's destined, if it's destined not to come through the legislature and either at all or in the form that we have it, wouldn't it be wonderful to know that sooner rather than later so that we can get moving? I agree with you, but either way, the ordinance is the ordinance. That is something within our power to change and that will be the priority after town meeting day. Anybody else? Thank you so much for coming. This was actually a very helpful conversation. I really appreciate you taking the time. Well, it is not often that the two of us get to sit on this side of the table. And actually the view is really nice. Thank you again for all that you do. And I agree with you, Commissioner Comerford. Commissioner Seguino is a tireless advocate for this work, incredibly organized. I always know that when I hear from her, if she's left me a question, if I don't answer it, she will be back looking for the answer and rightly so. But thank you all for the work that you've done and continue to do. Thank you. Thank you so much. And thank you too. Thank you. Both of you. Thank you. Okay, moving on to item 5.04, Shannon Tramill is here from Burlington Police Department. Before we embark on this, I think we have enough time. We do have time-certain speakers from the Center for Policing Equity at 7.15, but I'm hopeful that we will be able to wrap this up so that Shannon can get on with her evening. So I'm gonna just say a few words as introduction here. The CNA report, the consultants report that was a functional analysis of Burlington Police Department made over 150 recommendations for changes. Many of them changes to policy. And so one of the policies is DD 43, which is reporting of corruption and other misconduct and its guidance for officers in terms of how they would report corruption or misconduct. The process has been that the policy revision in response to the CNA recommendation started with the Burlington Police Department and Shannon has been shepherding this through. My understanding, Shannon, is that these changes were reviewed by the Burlington Police Officers Association. Correct. And now it comes to the commission. And so the commission has the obligation and authority to review policy changes and approve them or not approve them. And so the items for those who are watching online, we have the edits with track changes, DD 03, and we also have the CNA recommendations themselves. So what I'd like to do is just turn to Shannon for any comments or thoughts. And then I'll turn to the commission for questions. Shannon, thanks so much for taking the time to be here, by the way. Thank you. I mean, that was a perfect summary. I don't wanna take so much time again and just say that what we really did focus on were the recommendations of the CNA report. There are a few minor changes throughout DD 43 regarding formatting, trying to get that more consistent with the newer formatting of directives for the future. And really that was just collaborative work and taking the CNA recommendations, inserting those and kind of giving approval from the command staff at the department and then passed on. These changes didn't require any input from the city attorney's office. So that's one thing that didn't need to happen with this directive, but then also the BPOA did review and approve the suggested edits for this directive. And so this directive really just focused on changing the requirement of reporting to make it clear that they don't need to have proof, substantial proof and then go through and investigate, if somebody sees corruption or thinks that corruption is taking place that reasonable suspicion is fine to go ahead and report that and making it clear that there are methods to which several methods to which someone can choose and those choices is their preference. So officers and civilians in the department can make that choice as to who they'd like to report that to. So just making that a little bit clearer. And I believe those were the changes that the two major changes that were requested of CNA. Thank you very much. I'm gonna open this up to commissioners for any comments or questions. Okay, then I'll start. My question was how this responds to CNA's request that language be added to assist employees in understanding the choice between the reporting mechanisms. And my question is really related to the fact that there are a variety of reporting mechanisms. One of them, for example, is to HR, as compared to, let's say, reporting to the deputy chief or the officer-in-charge. I'm curious as to, so my point is the following. It seems to me that there are confidentiality issues that might influence how an officer would choose right, it might be more confidential to report to HR than to the officer-in-charge and so forth. And was there a reason that you didn't explicitly address that in this revision? So I'm speaking for me, I had similar, I had some similar concerns. However, the document did originally list out the four ways that someone could report misconduct. There's another directive, and I think it speaks in DD01, which we're working on revising as well, that talks about when someone, in fact, if someone is gonna report something to a deputy chief or even someone else in the department that that is a confidential matter to begin with in and of itself. So laying it out again, I don't know that it seemed, it seemed clear to the command staff at least that that was all of those matters were confidential to begin with, and that the choice really is of the officer or the civilian staff or professional staff in the department to make that they're based on their comfort level who they felt like they could report that to. I'm gonna, if I might follow up, I can imagine that that might be useful for an officer that had been with the department for a while, but if you have a brand new officer who actually doesn't know what the implications are of the various reporting mechanisms, it seems to me that it's not a big ask to clarify this information in this document, even if it is in another directive to clarify it here. I'm gonna just leave you with that comment. You don't have to respond right away and just I think other commissioners might have some comments here. Did you, Commissioner Rao or Commissioner Keefe? Just a quick question. I just noticed with the reporting to the deputy chief of admin, it does say a detailed written report. It seems like it's a more a stricter sort of reporting guideline. Is there any kind of difference in the types of complaints that would be sent to the deputy chief and might that be clarified? Just because it does say a detailed written report where the other mechanisms don't quite specify that. Sure, I'm gonna take note of both of those because I honestly, I don't know why one says a written report, so I definitely can look into that and clarify that, make it clearer as well. Comments from any other commissioner? Shannon, would it be okay then for us to leave this with you to discuss our comments with the command staff and so forth and bring this back again in March? Absolutely, yes. Okay, anybody else? All right, thank you. Thanks so much for being here, Shannon. We miss having you. Can I ask just a quick question of the commission? I think I saw something about DD03 discussion and so if you don't mind, if I hang out, if that's still on the agenda, I'm just gonna hang out here for that discussion as well. Certainly, I'm going to move to that item. I am not seeing it as clearly as I hope to on the agenda but I will just move into it. We have a few minutes before our speaker. So again, the commission agreed is working with the Burlington Police Department to address numerous policy revision recommendations and one of those is DD13, which is around mental health. Commissioner Rao and I are working on that and we hope to have a draft version to give to the police department by March 15th in time for review at our next meeting. Hopefully the command staff and BPOA will have a chance to review it by then. The other item is DD03 and we are simply waiting for the police department to send us your changes. We have asked certain folks to provide comment on it, the ACLU, Jeff Jones, a former state trooper, Mia Schultz from NAACP. So we'll be prepared with them to provide comment once you submit the revised version of that to us. Okay, excellent. If I might, I did have a conversation with Commissioner Rao and Councillor McGee from Public Safety in my, and just so that it's clear here for the commission as well, my attempt to or my start to revise this directive, which is the fair and impartial policing directive, it became, I became aware that the department did have this policy in effect for quite some time. And during the committee to review policing policies, this directive was rewritten by migrant justice and AALV. And so I brought to Commissioner Rao and Councillor McGee my thought that I first wanted to make sure that I wasn't rewriting their directive in a way that wasn't acceptable with them or that they didn't approve of. So I felt like I was a little bit torn with that. And also looked to them to provide some people within the organizations, those organizations in the community that I could chat with about actually providing us the examples. So the request is to add examples for officers and staff in the department to be alerted to as to what they can look for that may be biased, that they could then report or do something about. I didn't feel, and I didn't feel like it was the department's place to come up with those examples. I think that that input should be given by other individuals. And so that is kind of where that directive has, I don't want to say stopped, but where we're at in the rewrite of that directive at this time. So you're waiting for input on those examples? Is that correct? We did just meet towards the end of last week, I believe it was. And so Councillor McGee was going to get me some contacts and Commissioner Rao and I were going to look into, and I apologize, Commissioner. I believe it was Bend, Oregon. Is that, was that correct? At some of the ways and possible examples. So I didn't think like scouring the internet for some examples was a good use of what the community would want out of us. And then again, I didn't think that it was right for us to come up with these examples that I really think that others should have, you know, give us these examples pretty much. And that's where we're at at this point. Great, that sounds perfect. I appreciate that. And thanks for giving us the background on that. Great. Thank you. Thank you so much. And one last item with regard to policy revision. So one of the other policy revisions that's going to happen is around the complaint policy. Commissioner Keith is going to be working with DC Labarge in terms of hopefully streamlining the complaint process. It's very complex in terms of when we get the complaint, when the department does an investigation, when we respond and we'd like to make it a bit more streamlined. There are some other pieces that we anticipate working towards revision and it may be that this would be with regard to the city council resolution and ordinance. But one of the, I'll just share one piece of this. The city attorney, Haley, assistant city attorney, I guess Haley McLenahan, and I spoke this evening and she pointed out to me that some aspects of the complaint policy actually contradict public open meeting law and public records law. And it is a policy as compared to statute and so forth. And so we will have to iron out some of those contradictions that exist there. And the commission, just again for the public, we've had this discussion before, but the commission is interested in following the Boulder, Colorado model in which complaints are made public. Redacted for private information, but nevertheless, so that there is greater transparency that the public understands what kinds of complaints are being received and how those are being decided on in terms of the response to the complaint. So that is just to sort of alert members of the public. That's work that's ongoing and it's gonna take us several months to complete that. And the pieces that relate to the CNN recommendations will be completed sooner, but that's work to be done. Okay, I'd like to move to the next item on the agenda. And I am really quite astonished that we're still ahead of time on our schedule, which I'm very happy about. And I'd like to, this is item 5.06 with members of the Center for Policing Equity. And I'd like to turn this over to Commissioner Comberford, who is the commissioner who organizes educational interventions for the commission and the community. And I'd like to turn it over to her to introduce our guest speakers and welcome. Well, first I'd like to welcome both of you. Tonight we have two guests from the Center for Policing Equity, who are gonna talk to us about mental health emergency responses. Charlotte Ressing is a government affairs manager with the policy team at the Center for Policing Equity. Prior to joining CPE in May, 2021, Charlotte spent years working on criminal justice reform at both the national and local level. Most recently, Charlotte provided technical assistance to counties and cities working to improve their crisis response to disrupt the cycle of incarceration. Before that, Charlotte worked at the American Civil Liberties Union, serving as a federal advocate for criminal justice reform and a drug policy expert. Charlotte has a JD from the University of the District of Columbia, David A. Clark School of Law and received a BA from Tulane University. Welcome, Charlotte. Charlotte Neath is the policy research manager at the Center for Policing Equity, where she leads the development of CPE's evidence-informed stances and related resources to advance equity, justice, and safety. Prior to joining CPE in 2020, she spent several years working on criminal justice reform at the national level, including supporting a network of prosecutors at fair and just prosecution and working in the communications department of the Vera Institute of Justice. Charlotte holds a BA from the University of Texas at Austin and a master of public policy with distinction from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. Welcome. Welcome, Charlotte and Charlotte. Let me just say by way of introduction again to the people who are watching is we were interested in hearing from Charlotte and Charlotte with regard to the CPE's work on this issue because the Burlington is moving towards a CAHOOTS type model for mental health intervention and it's therefore relevant to something that we're gonna be embarking on. And we felt that it was important for us to continue to learn about this even as we're embarking on this. So thank you so much and welcome. Thank you so much for having us. I really appreciate it. I'm gonna share my screen. We have a little presentation for you all. This working? All right, great. Thank you so much for having us. Again, I'm also gonna throw in the chat. So we've really come into this work through a huge evidence-based research project that Charlotte and I have undertaken to really get behind what the numbers are in alternative response and to find how best communities can respond to mental health emergencies. So I'm including in the chat a link to our paper and resources on mental health emergency response. It is a long, we have a long white paper as well as a short two-pager that you can find there. And so yeah, so a lot of these are our findings from our report as well as some of the findings that we have come across as we've worked with communities implementing and standing up mental health alternative response and also working with police departments to improve their response to mental health emergencies. So about the Center for Policing Equity, we are a research and action group that uses science to promote racial justice and public safety systems. We work to create safer communities by reducing the footprint of law enforcement. We've partnered with over 60 law enforcement agencies in 30 states and we rely and base all of our research in science that says situations predict bias more than individual biases. So this is a real breakdown of the research and our recommendations in the paper. We won't be getting super in-depth into all of them but the main sort of corrects of them are here. We're asking communities to invest in alternative response programs to regulate police response to mental health emergencies in order to at least provide a band-aid and really help some of these responses before places, Institute Alternative Response Programs and even after since we know police will continue to respond to some mental health emergencies, investing in equitable mental healthcare and improving data collection transparency and just a few notes on here and won't spend too much time on it but investing in equitable mental healthcare we view as a really important aside and obviously you all are not in a position necessarily to do that but when we talk to municipal leaders we do ask that standing up equitable and a sufficient mental healthcare be like come with the alternative emergency response. We want people to be able to have mental healthcare before emergencies pop up and improving data collection transparency I think it's self-explanatory. So here's a little bit of the national landscape on alternative mental health response and here's some stats about why alternative mental health response is necessary. So seven to 10% of police encounters involve a person who has mental illness. People with mental illness are no more likely to act violently than anyone else in the community but police do arrest, injure and kill people with mental illness at higher rates. In fact, people with serious mental illness are 12 times more likely to experience use of force by police. And here's a few little stats and we apologize if you all know this since we know you're far into this process but so in Texas alone they're seeing seven communities that have or implementing alternative mental health response programs Montana has six, Iowa has a program that's responding in 18 rural counties. We're seeing some pop up in universities across the country as well. And here are some examples of these alternative response models. Some of them are a little bit more famous than others. I just wanted to include some of the last known ones like Texas, Montana and some of these are more rural locations where I think people don't realize that these programs are being set up. So some key evidence on alternative response. A Denver Star program had a study recently that came out that the program and it was a very narrow scope. They were in a very small part of the city of Denver and were only responding during particular hours but they estimated that the program prevented nearly 1400 criminal offenses in the duration of the pilot. There was an overall reduction of offenses even in off hours. And during the pilot police were never at any point called for backup. No responses ended in or after injury. Eugene's Cahoots which is a very famous model obviously the original diverts and estimated a three to 8% of calls that would otherwise be handled by police and responded to 16,479 calls in just in 2021. They've had an analysis done that estimates that the city has saved $6.1 million by having the alternative response program respond to these calls as opposed to their police department. And I'm gonna turn over to Scarlett for our next bit here. Thank you. So I'm gonna go over some of the insights on best practices that we've learned from taking a look at these different programs, talking to the people that have stood them up and have helped run them. So first and foremost, these programs are really designed to fit local needs and they are designed in consultation with a wide variety of stakeholders, local city leaders, community members, mental health and substance use service providers, emergency services, including police and dispatch are often all at the table, but stakeholders should definitely consult people who would be served by this programming and those with lived experience of police contact to make sure that they're meeting their unique needs. And to maximize effectiveness, the team should be available 24 seven, recognizing that that is often difficult to achieve citywide at first. So a lot of these programs serve certain neighborhoods to begin and they should be available to be called by a direct number to the program, as well as through 911 through non-emergency lines like 311 and through 988, which was launched last year nationwide as a universal 24 seven hotline for mental health emergency response that really aims to separate mental health related calls from normal 911 calls. And dispatch is really key to the success of alternative response systems because that is what is able to take a call and say that police shouldn't necessarily be involved in this situation, the alternative crisis response system should be, but we found that adequately funding, staffing and training dispatch workers is a really are huge issues throughout the country. They're facing low rates of pay and adequate training to do all the new things that folks are asking them to do. So what we found is to maximize dispatch to support these new programs, we need to fund salaries of dispatch workers to prevent people from leaving and then also fund training for them to be able to meet the needs of this new system. So for example, dispatch can be improved by workers being trained to ask open-ended questions that allow and encourage callers to describe the behavior being exhibited rather than a specific diagnosis that they might not even be aware of to better identify a potential mental health emergency situation. We also recommend providing dispatchers with clear dispatch and diversion criteria to prevent bias from influencing decisions about which kind of responses needed. So for example, Virginia has developed a four-tier framework to help dispatch staff assess the risk level of a call and deploy the appropriate response in a really objective and consistent manner. We also recommend that callers to emergency lines are told that emergency mental health services are available. So for example, when you call 911 in the city of Austin, you're met with a response that says, do you need fire, police or mental health services? And finally, this is a big one. We recommend that mental health clinicians are embedded with 911 dispatchers, which can significantly improve the efficiency of dispatch operations by helping to triage what situations are appropriate for which response. And then they can also help resolve some mental health related calls over the phone and you don't even need the dispatch someone to the team. Next slide. And the second bucket of recommendations around standing up these programs is related to funding. So obviously funding these programs is a challenge and kind of similar to the dispatch staff issue, a lot of cities are having trouble recruiting enough social workers. So even once a program is green lit and they have a budget and they're ready to hire people, it can take months and months to actually find these staff to fill these roles because social work is a underpaid field and it is difficult to find people who will do it to be quite honest. So just wanted to flag that as a sort of high level issue, but the list here is different kinds of funding that cities have used. And then also worth noting that sometimes localities use a variety of these approaches in tandem. So the first most common is programs are funded just out of the city's budget. This is the case with Kahootz and Eugene and officials there see the program as a net cost saving because of the number Charlotte cited earlier that it would take an additional $6.4 million to have the police cover the calls that Kahootz is currently covering. The Denver SAR program was funded out of a ballot initiative that increased the sales tax. There's also private funding that have started these programs, money reallocated from local police departments. And then there's potential new funding that is being enacted through the 988 crisis hotline that is prompting some states to pass a local a small tax on cell phone usage with the purpose of meeting the need of developing more crisis programs to answer the calls made to that line. And finally, there's a few federal funding streams that have been used. Medicaid is a big one. So alternative response programs are eligible for Medicaid reimbursement. And then American Rescue Plan funding as part of the COVID Recovery Act. It's also worth noting that funding should be dedicated to evaluate the program, not just launch it in order to create the evidence base needed to sustain it over years and years. And I'll turn it back over to Charlotte. Thanks, Charlotte. So our final sort of batch of information here is about police and alternative response collaboration. And one thing I wanna talk about off the bat is that I think one of the more surprising findings and responses that we're getting from some of the communities that we're working in is actually that a lot of these alternative response programs tend to be popular with rank and file officers. In Denver, they're seeing the majority of calls come from officers when they arrive on the scene. They aren't coming from community members and they don't have the greatest diversion from 911 calls, so that is part of it. But police officers show up on the scene and they want alternative response there instead of them. I also just briefly wanna touch on why alternative response is important as opposed to co-response. We do talk about co-response in our paper and it can be a good harm reduction measure, but ultimately alternative response is the only response to mental health emergencies that place healthcare and appropriate care at the center of response and not police and punitive responses. There's also limited evidence of how effective those programs actually are. There have been a lot more studies on CIT and co-response than there have been on alternative response and part of that is that there hasn't been funding allocated for data collection and analysis as these programs are being stood up, but with CIT and some co-response models, there have been some private actors that make money off of training and other things that do a lot of research and put a lot of it out so therefore have a lot of research on it. When we did our research, we found at the end that we still think that alternative response is the best way to go about this. So these are a few of our other recommendations that are really relating to how police and alternative response would collaborate in the field. Dispatch, as we've kind of already gone over, is extremely important and a lot of jurisdictions that are finding big success. Dispatch falls from 911, from the get-go. And then another huge recommendation is that officers should be required to call for assistance from specialty mental health teams under specific, in specific circumstances as opposed to it being optional. If there is no risk of harm and there is a case that an officer thinks is a mental health call, they should be required to call on this other team. But in addition to that, officers obviously should still be trained on de-escalation and calming tactics. We also have some recommendations in our paper around pre-arrest diversion, where there can be mandatory requirements for mandatory inclusion in pre-arrest diversion as opposed to exclusion to include more people and exclude some of the bias that we see in a lot of other diversion programs. And officers need to be provided with alternative service resources. So they should have the resources to be able to, in the field, give people guidance on where they should go for certain issues. And our final recommendation with police and alternative response collaboration is that we suggest prohibiting the use of ketamine and other chemical restraints by first responders, except for in the case of a medical emergency in which it is necessary. But that decision should be made by medical professionals and not police. And thank you so much for having us again. We are very much open to any questions you may have now or if any pop up in the future, please feel free to reach out to Scarlett or I. Thank you so much. That was great. And just for again, for members of the public, the copy of this report and the executive summary are posted on board docs. I wonder if I might invite Councillor McGee to the table because you may have questions yourself. And I have some questions for you in this open discussion. Can I invite members of the commission to comment or ask questions of our guest speakers? Commissioner Comerford. Thank you for the presentation. I'm wondering what year was your study done? So we actually haven't done our own study. This was more of a review of the existing studies and science in the field. It is actually something that we're very much hoping and I think our science team is working on right now. But we have not done a landscape review of the numbers or done any particular research in this space specifically as of now. A lot of our research is more centered on equity in certain types of use of force and stops and things like that for departments. And I'm thinking about the massive numbers of people who have been displaced and clearly have emotional distress. And I'm wondering if there's anything that you've seen so far that talks about that vis-a-vis mental health in the police department. I have not seen anything that directly links that although I would love for someone to do that research. And I certainly in my long list of things that I would like our science team to research I'm happy to add that one. I will say that there is definitely and in our paper we do talk about how environmental factors can impact mental health and how that should be a consideration when you're thinking about investing in equitable mental health care and standing up these systems and how people are under different types of stress depending on their environments. Do we have a copy of your paper? It's posted on board docs. Okay, we have it. Thank you, it was really interesting. Thanks. Commissioner Rao. Thank you so much for your presentation. That was very informative actually and I took notes. One of the things that kind of interested me about your discussion today was and this is more of a question than a statement which is the role of the dispatch and how important it is. It's sort of one of the things that I notice in our complaints, some of the complaints that we receive and myself as well who has called the police department, it's very important to have somebody on the other side as the first contact with the citizen. So I wonder if you can share with us a list of kind of to-do list for the dispatch, something that people can quickly, you know, the BPD, Burlington Police Department, quickly grab on to as a starting point. I know what you are suggesting is a multi-process, multi-level kind of a paradigm shift. But just from a very quick perspective, is there something that you can share with the police department right now and say, hey, let's start with these to-do lists on how to identify mental health crises as opposed to more critical criminal activities. Thank you. Yes, so we definitely have a more extensive discussion of the specifics of specific recommendations for dispatch. And I will say, I think, I mean, I think a lot is being talked about in terms of dispatch right now and how important it is and like what a crux it is in response broadly. So we do have lists of recommendations in the report. I think that there would likely be lots more that aren't included in our report to be honest. But I think every locality is going about it differently and have different problems related to dispatch. So we wanted to keep the report as general as possible in order to be as applicable as possible to different jurisdictions. And I can actually, this is kind of Scarlett's real area of expertise. So I can turn it over to her if she has anything to add, I don't know, but. No, I think Charlotte said everything. I mean, it's really unfortunately very jurisdiction specific once you get into the more nuances of day-to-day operations of dispatch. And there's people other than us who are like totally dedicated to that question. So we can maybe after this point, you in the direction of some resources of folks who are doing this work in a little bit more detail, if that would be helpful. Yes, so thank you. Commissioner Roski. Thank you. Have you worked with any other communities in Vermont? I do not believe so. Scarlett, no. I don't think so either. Councilor McGee, did you wanna ask any questions or follow up at all? I don't have any questions. Thank you all for the presentation. I look forward to reading the longer report. And I'm happy to answer any questions that the commission has about where we're at in the process. I can also speak to some of the dispatch questions that we have right now because we're definitely in an interesting space with that. So. Hopefully, Charlotte and Scarlett, you'll stay with us a moment, but I'm gonna bring in Councilor McGee who is more knowledgeable about where we are in this process. The city did allocate, I think, $400,000 to begin this alternative mental health interventions and additional funding was provided by the state as I understand it. I wanna just highlight that as Commissioner Rao said, a number of the complaints we get are about dispatch. And this really suggests to me, this is a really good early warning for us that this really needs to be really well developed. The other piece that really stands out to me is what is required of officers in terms of being required to call mental health and also to be knowledgeable about the resources that are available. And I wonder if Councilor McGee, if you can enlighten us, my understanding is that the police department is not gonna manage this, that the structure is going to be a bit different. And I wonder if you could enlighten us about what that is gonna look like. Sure, I can speak to it as best I can. I think we, as you said, Commissioner Saguino, we had $400,000 allocated to stand up this model that was funding based off of the percentage of the Eugene police budget that Kahootz accounts for, which is around 2% of their police budget, but their police budget is much larger than ours. And so it was for a long time a big gap between the proposal that we received from the Howard Center to start an alternative response model and what we've allocated for it. So we did get that funding from the state. I believe it's over $300,000. It's $600,000 spread out over two years. And so we are gonna have to be looking for funding to continue that, but we do have funding and someone within the police department now to help with the implementation of actually making this operational. And so Jackie Corbley with the city has been working with the Howard Center to figure out exactly where this fits into the services that the Howard Center already provides and how we'll work with dispatch. Right now the Howard Center has street outreach, which in a perfect world would be operating from eight to eight, seven days a week. That is currently not the hours that they're able to meet. So there's a gap there in service. And it's not really clear from who you're supposed to call when you would like street outreach to go somewhere. You can call 911. You can call the Howard Center first call number. Both of those are gonna kind of take their time to work their way through the system. So it's not as cut and dry of you call dispatch and dispatch is going to immediately reach out to the alternative responder. And so I'm hopeful that over the next few months we're gonna see a lot more progress on making that operational. And the funding is there. Hiring's gonna have to start soon. And that's all gonna be in coordination with the police department and the Howard Center. But I think my understanding is it will work the way it works in Eugene where the Eugene Police Department contracts with the Weyberg Clinic and the Kahootz team to provide that alternative response service. Who in city government who is responsible for coordinating this? That would be Jackie Corbley with the police department. Jackie was hired in the fall to actually start moving this through the process to apply for that state grant to get that funding. I see. Any other follow up? If I might ask if a Scarlett and Charlotte, a couple of other questions. One of the discussion items here has been that the extent to which the time that the police put in on calls will be diminished as a result of this alternative model. Do you know what the experience, and one of the questions is will mental health providers actually be able to answer calls themselves or will they still need an officer and will there actually really be a reduction in terms of the time demands on police officers? Can you speak to that at all in terms of the experience of other alternative models? Yeah, I think a lot of jurisdictions are seeing that there is a lot less police time spent on this and I think that's why we're getting the whispers and responses we are especially out of Denver because I think it's much easier for officers to show up on scene and get the real experts so to speak involved and have them handle things and that's definitely where the money savings that one study conducted and Eugene found are coming from is police time. And this is actually something that we would really like to it's another in our list of things that we would really like our science team to do research on the actual reduction in officer hours and how much that costs. But I think pretty much across the board there's a reduction in officer hours. This is some mental health calls tend to be very long calls and stressful for officers as well. And I think every jurisdiction is seeing a lot less officer response. Again, in Denver, they didn't have any officer call-ins after alternative response was dispatch. And then even in Cahoots, they have some calls where they do that where police are called in at some point during the response. But it's not, it's very few. It is not common. Thank you. That's something interesting. It's not what we've heard from other discussions. So it's helpful to know that. I wanna ask you another question with regard to you were talking about pre-arrest diversion and you said that there tends to be bias in diversions. Can you explain that a bit more? Yeah, so there's been a lot and we do get into this in the paper in a little bit more depth as well. And I'm bad with numbers. So I won't be able to quote the numbers at you. But one of the issues with diversion broadly and diversion at every step of the process is that we do see discrepancies by race in terms of who gets included in diversion or who gets the opportunity to participate in diversion. And so one of the ways that we've come up with there really aren't very many places doing mandatory considerations for diversion. But it's our suggestion in order to lower the racial discrepancies in who gets diversion available for whom diversion is available too. All right. Thank you. I appreciate it. Any other questions or comments? Commissioner Comerford. Throughout the work that you did, what were the major points of pushback? Ooh. So I honestly, in the jurisdictions that I've talked to and everything I've read about it, I think it's really different in every location. I think some municipalities have a lot of buy-in from their police department. And so there aren't as much, there isn't as much of that pushback, but I think there have been localities that have had some issues with departments viewing this as sort of like taking over some of their duties. But a lot of jurisdictions, there's a lot of buy-in and therefore they're very supportive, but that is one. And I think ultimately in terms of pre-setting up the programs, I think there's a lot of concerns over funding generally. But a lot of times I think there's a misunderstanding of how a lot of these programs are funded across the country. It's really diverse how folks are standing these up and how they pay for them. And I think really with the last few that have been set up around the country that have been big ones and have pilots, a lot of those don't have any money coming from the police budget. They're using, and as Scarlett talked about, they're using a really diverse and sort of creative funding streams, including Medicaid and state grants and funds through their Health and Human Services departments, as well as some federal funding and others. So I think funding tends to be pre-setting up the team a big issue. After set up, they're broadly popular. It seems like as long as you can get good data collection to do some analysis and show like why it's helpful, I think broadly people then want it and they want more of it. Are there any best practices in terms of the setup process itself that makes it more amenable to be embraced? I think one of the main things in set up, and it's also one of the most difficult is community buy-in. So really having a diverse group of stakeholders involved in the process and able to feel heard and continuing that process into implementation. It's actually one of the things that Denver has actually been getting some pushback on is that some of the community members and directly impacted folks who were involved in a lot of the conversations before they set up the pilot, now feel a little shut out. But I mean, community engagement is difficult. It requires a lot of resources and it requires a lot of effort and intentionality, but I think it is ultimately one of the best ways to get buy-in, to get folks to trust the alternative responders, to be able to get police to trust the responders and really just making sure people have a seat at the table. Thank you. Oh, actually, sorry, but also the data collection, I'll just say it like again and again and again, data collection analysis so that you can prove that this is something worthwhile to have. Thank you so much to both of you for being here. We really appreciate it. And thank you, Commissioner, Councilor McGee also for being here. And I just wanna reiterate that part of the commission's role is helping to educate the community around public safety issues. And we felt that this was timely to have given that we really are on the verge of embarking on this. So thank you all and thanks to everybody for the discussion. Thank you so much for having us. Take care. Moving on to item 5.07, some chair updates, if you will. I'm gonna just turn it over to co-chair Rao who's gonna discuss the commission's website. Thank you, Commissioner Seguino. I have been working with the indomitable Mohammed who has been working with me quite diligently and we have made some progress towards getting the website, Burlington Police Commission website. It's moving, right? I mean, we are making some progress. I met with Scott Barker who is the chief innovative officer, innovation officer, a city of Burlington. Mohammed and I met and we have a blueprint to start with. And what I need from you is a personal photograph and Mohammed, you took some photographs today. So we are going to at least start with a very simple front page when we are also looking for a very short biography of each of you, a photograph and a very short biography, two to three sentences maybe. And then we will at least launch it within the next month or so if we get all the information. Commissioner Seguino and I will also have to write down a description of what our goals and not goals, responsibilities are, which seems to be shape shifting. So I think what we will do is come up with some bullet points, share it with you to at least have a linear information out there for the public. Is there anything else to add, Mohammed, beyond what I have just mentioned today? Is there any other information we need? Just we are waiting on the city support team to give us access to be able to edit. And we will have just, as I'm gonna be the one who's have access to the website, I'll just have quick training from the support team and that we'll be ready to go on. Are you saying you haven't gotten the access yet? No, yeah, just waiting the access. So maybe we need to follow up on Mr. Marker. I can do that. All right, thank you. And just for the public, it'll be a place where we can will post agenda to the meeting. I think it probably would be good to post the link to CCTV recording of the meeting. And so forth. If you look at other civilian oversight bodies, they tend to have all of that information in one place. So I think it'll help us do a job of informing the public about what we're doing. I have one other footnote to what you just said. Commissioner Seguino is that we will be moving away from the Burlington Police Department website. I think that's the biggest change. There will be a link from their website, but there will be, of our website, but there will be a link from the city website. Yes, correct. Which will be the primary link, if I am understanding that correctly. I wonder if- Commissioner Comfort. Comfort. I wonder if it's possible to excerpt from the CCTV piece, just the educational pieces and have a special place for those. I don't know if that's possible to do. Yes, we haven't actually gotten to the part of having like a more sub-linking, you know, like the little other, there's a main page and there are other subsidiary pages. I think we will have to at some point sit down with Mr. Barker and figure out how to do that and what would be that additional resources that we can put on. So all, you know, all the documents, all the educational aspect, actually that's a great idea. So Mohammed, sure, we can definitely work on that soon. A couple of other items to update you on. One is the issues that the unresolved issues with regard to the commission's access to materials needed to review complaints. We had gotten an opinion from our legal counsel that the commission's access should be different than for the public, because we are a body appointed by the city council. Upon the advice of President Paul, I reached out to the city attorneys to talk about developing a non-disclosure agreement to address any confidentiality issues. And the basic premise of this would be that the non-disclosure agreement would include unfettered access to any information the department avails itself of in conducting investigations of complaints use of force and use of force incidents provided that the information wouldn't violate state or federal law, an active court order, or violate an agreement between the state or federal law enforcement agency. And so that was the guidance we gave to the city attorney, Jared Pellerin. He is working with Chief Murad to develop a draft and we will work that through. Hopefully that will resolve the issues not only of access to unredacted investigative reports but also to the issue of being able to retain videos for more than three days, which has been an administrative problem and hassle for us. So that is in the works. One other piece of information in line with my conversation with this attorneys, McLenahan and Pellerin came the discussion of recording executive sessions and attorney McLenahan told me that it's actually quite common to record executive session meetings. They are equivalent to notes and therefore they are exempt from four year requests and so forth. And so we will, one of the issues of course is because if there are meetings on complaints and there's a different memory with regard to what happens and during these meetings there's a difference of opinion in what was said, what was agreed upon. We will have a recorded sessions and they will be kept in a more secure area on the SharePoint site that Mohamed and I will work out. So this is just to let you all know that we've had this discussion before but we will start recording executive sessions for us to be able to retain the information. I think that is it for me on that item. Does anybody have any questions about that? Commissioner Comerford. What happens to the information in perpetuity? I'm gonna just say that we'll probably work this out. I think that's a good question and what you're saying is for example how long will these be retained and so forth. I think it's something that's a good question and we should think about that. I, my sense is that if the executive sessions are covering complaints that have not yet been resolved we need to retain them but it would seem to me if they cover complaints that have already been resolved then we don't need them anymore. Okay, moving on to item 5.08 use of force reports and again I'm just gonna say a few things to the public that this is a relatively new process on the commission about a year and a half I think commissioner Grant maybe recalls but use of force reports are now all reported to the commission on a monthly basis. We get a brief synopsis and the public can see these reports and they are brought to the commission if the commission has concerns about any of the incidents we can request to look into them further we can request the body wearing camera videos to review ourselves. I will say that these are brief synopsis so this doesn't mean that we have thoroughly reviewed every use of force incident. We can only go by the information that is given to us in these reports so it doesn't suggest that we are approving if you will every use of force incident. This is just a mechanism for us to be able to look into those that we think may be a cause for concern. So with that we have three use of force reports for the last half of December. We got the reports for the first half of December at our December meeting so we have those for last half of December all of January and all of February. So I'd like to ask commissioners if they have any questions or concerns about these and would like to ask for any videos to be reviewed. So let me start with the December report. Commissioner Garrison. Yeah I don't necessarily have a concern. I just think that we should do our diligence to review body cam. So with that being said I would like to see number six, number nine and number 13 of December. I also have January and February but I can wait till you get to that. Okay. Anybody else for December use of force report? Just a moment here. We have talked about asking individual commissioners to take primary responsibility or for reviewing videos. We all will get them but if somebody takes the lead on them that will be helpful for us. And so once I have the list I'll see if I can ask people to volunteer to take the lead on reviewing the videos. So with regard to January of 2023, Commissioner Garrison you had others. Commissioner Grant. For December, number three and number eight. Thank you. January use of force report. Commissioner Garrison. I would like to see number two. Thank you. And February, Commissioner Garrison. I have number five and that will be it for me. Any others? Commissioner Grant, do I see your hand up? I'm sorry, did Commissioner Grant, go ahead. Yes, yes I agree number five. Okay. Commissioner Keefe. February number nine, number 11 please. If I will, the chiefs are on February break but I will convey this by Friday to DC LeBreck. So if you have additional use of force incidents that you'd like videos on please just email me before Friday and I'd like to, this is one thing one should never do as a former professor is add lib here but I'm gonna add lib. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. There are nine incidents and there are seven commissioners. I am going to, if you don't mind, use my executive authority here to assign videos right here and now. That was not a question, it was just me doing my thing. Okay, I'm going to, and Mohamed you'll be getting this detail. December number six, Kevin Garrison, number nine, Commissioner Keefe, number 13, Commissioner Rao, number three, Commissioner Seguino, number eight, Commissioner Comerford. Let me ask Commissioner Oskie, you comfortable? Sure, let's do this. For you it would be a video two from January, incident number two from January and we'll give you a little bit of a tutorial on some of the mechanics of this. So then we're gonna, Commissioner Grant, incident five from February and then we're gonna assign double duty one to Commissioner Garrison, incident nine in February and can I just ask for a volunteer for the number 11 from February? Anybody, Commissioner Oskie? Okay, so just to remind you of the procedure for this, the procedure that's still evolving, I should say we're still working on this, is that we all will look at the videos. Typically we won't be communicating with the chiefs about these until our next meeting, but if each of you who is responsible for a video, I would just ask that you would write a summary, brief summary and in particular what we wanna do is to alert other commissioners if you think that there's something really substantive here to be seen because there often are a lot of videos and we don't have enough person power to really review them all. So the person taking the lead is really gonna signal the others as to whether how much time they should invest in those videos. We will go on from there. Yes, Commissioner Comerford. Do you wanna identify particular places in the video? Thank you. So you should note the time stamp in the sections of the video that are of concern, for example, yes. Commissioner Garrison. No, I just wanted to add that as well, other commissioners can view unassigned videos, body cam videos if they would like to. Exactly, we'll all get the videos. We, Commissioner Grant, just one moment, we in the past, DC Labreck has only released them and they expire after three days. And that's been a challenge because if it's during the work week, some of us don't have the chance to do that. We'd certainly like to extend that. But if you don't get to see it within three days, if it expires, then please just let me know and I will ask. And when I do ask DC Labreck, he will re-release the videos to everybody. So you will be getting a lot of videos. And as I said, Commissioner Hoske will talk to you about the mechanics of this. Commissioner Grant. Hi, thank you. I just also wanted to mention that sometimes an incident has multiple videos and it's good to watch them all no matter how long or how short they are. It could include, if multiple officers on the scene, it can include things from different angles and include information that can be helpful when looking at the incident. And when looking at multiple videos, each video is gonna have its own number related to the incident. So I just wanted to mention that. Great, thank you. Commissioner Rao. Commissioner Saguino, is there a process here as to how you want to go about us doing this? Do we email you if there is a concern or we remain silent or how do you actually wanna do this? I think that now that we have a SharePoint site, I think people can submit to Mohammed and copy me and he will post it, will work on a spot on the SharePoint site for these use of force discussions. Great, we are still evolving. I'm just, Commissioner Oskie, where our work is expanded and we're continuing to try to refine our processes and this one is in process. Commissioner Comerford. This sounds like a new procedure for us and we were thinking about a procedure handbook as a draft, we might wanna think about that. Sure, sounds good. Okay, then moving on to agenda item 66. 0.01, commendations that have been received. Mr. Ibrahim, would you kindly share those commendations? Yes, sure. So the commission received two commendations from the police department. The first one is a resident wrote to Chief Murad saying my wife and I want to commend officer Boer. A couple of days ago, officer Boer came to our door to return a license plate that had been removed from the front of our car and attached it to a stolen vehicle by someone who subsequently committed various crimes in the neighborhood. Thanks to his brief servants, he was able to determine that we were not involved in any way in the crimes and was kind enough to go out of his way to return our license, played to us. He was very professional and courteous in our prisons and obviously he is a real asset to the department. The second one, another resident wanted to commend community officer Young. They said the community officer Young responded after another driver rear-ended my car yesterday. He was sure myself and the other driver were okay and professionally handled the situation while completing the police report. He informed us of Nick's tips and reassured us even as we were quite shaken after the ordeal. CSO Young's professionalism, kindness and commitment to service came through strong during my interaction with him. I just wanted to thank him again and also let his superiors know about this very positive interaction. Thank you very much. And I just want to remind the public that part of our job is oversight but it's also to share the successes of the police department and these commendations go towards that goal. So thank you, Mohamed. So this brings us to item 7.01, commissioner updates and comments. Just want to say that we are slightly over on time and we do have an executive session but I'd like to afford any commissioner to provide any updates or comments that they would like to at this time. Okay, thank you so much. I want to then move to enter executive session pursuant to one VSA 313A4 to discuss disciplinary actions against employees. That is a motion. Is there a second to that motion? Commissioner Garrison, any discussion? All those in favor of moving into executive session, please raise your hand. Commissioner Grant, did you want to vote on moving into executive session? I didn't see your hand. Okay, it's unanimous. So thank you. Just want to note that when we go into executive session, we won't be making any decisions when we come out of executive session and therefore the meeting will conclude once the executive session is over. So I'd like a motion to adjourn this portion of our meeting. Commissioner Rao, seconded by commissioner Comerford. All in favor, please say aye. Passes unanimously, thank you all so much. We will convene in the Sharon Busher room in about 10 minutes. Muhammad, is that correct, the Sharon Busher room? Yes, 815, yes. Okay, thank you very much.