 Thank you so much for coming out tonight, my name is Nolan Rampey, I'm a clinician at Howard Center and involved with the Union. I'm also a longtime activist here at Burlington and a member of Tempest Plectic, which is a socialist organization. So yeah, thank you again for coming out tonight. We've got a great panel of speakers that's going to be focused on police accountability states, you know, police accountability and how we can address that through a myriad of different ways. So we've got speakers that are going to give general overview of, you know, what's happened since the Black Lives Matter and then you fund the police movement as well as speak of the free per movement. I'll give some more individualized introductions for each individual speaker and then along with the police accountability and a Howard Center president who's going to be talking about some of the social services. So there's going to be a lot to discuss after the speakers. There will be a chance for an open discussion where people can ask questions, give comments, so hopefully that can all be really productive. All right, so our first speaker is going to be Paul Fleckenstein who will kind of be giving that overview of what things have looked like since the deep on the police movement and where we're at right now. Paul is a longtime activist here in Burlington. He was actually involved in getting a police station shut down or not being built for it back in the 90s, which is great. He's also a member of the Tempest Collective, so please welcome Paul. A great panel of speakers after this and really political thinkers to really take on a big topic. So I'm going to try to do my part here. It's been an incredibly violent week. Mass shootings, more police lynchings, and the whole, this reminds me, this topic calls the whole social order into question, which is one of the reasons that the backlash has been so strong around cutting police and cutting prisons. So I want to lay out a few markers for this discussion, and I think this will generally, my talk anyway, will move from being kind of general to being more specific about the direction that we can go. So with the markers, this first framework, the current pro-police backlash against defining police and prisons and against being in people's needs is shaped by the role of policing in capitalist society and what has happened since the George Floyd uprising that began in May of 2020. Class societies depend on violence. Capitalist states make full use of law of policing and incarceration to maintain a particular social order organized around profit. The ruling class in the U.S. and elsewhere has responded to capitalist crises in the last 50 years with a particular regime of austerity, of policing and incarceration, and other messes to contain control of press groups and to undermine working class and community solidarity. In recent history, we've seen the George Floyd uprising. So this regime was challenged by the mass protests of 2020. Over 20 million people, maybe over 25 million people in the U.S. engaged in protests, often disrupted, to say the least, after the police lynching in George Floyd, and tens of millions of more joined internationally in over 100 countries. Black land, multiracial, predominantly young, everywhere in the U.S., the protests were popular across the working class. The torching of precinct three in Minneapolis got majority approval in opinion polls, and demands for defunding police and refunding social needs for abolishing police and prisons and historic advances. Local politicians were forced to respond to the demands of the movements. The states suppressed the uprising with violence, and were over some 20,000 arrests, not to mention the brutality that was involved in containing and shutting down protests. Thousands of serious injuries, prosecutions, new laws, primarily pushed by Republicans against protests and defunding and defending vigilante violence, spearheaded by unlawful drivers for one thing, or free of liability for running as protesters. There was also the co-optation. The co-optation occurred through redirecting the movement into elections and the Democratic Party. I can't remember former President Obama's intervention with LeBron James to cut off the NBA basketball clears, joining the protest movement in a stride, and instead partying out the vote for the elections. There were also political and organizational weaknesses across the broad left, like DSA, failed miserably to relate to the uprising effectively, and this hindered the capacity of the movement. Subsequently, police reform laws passed, basically amounting to more money, technology, and training for policing. Virtually everywhere there were small cuts to police budgets, these have been reversed. Now, we'll talk specifically about Burlington later on, because I think that has its own unique character here. That's important to take up. There's been no change in police killings, one every eight hours, with a record number in 2022, some of 12,000, sorry, 1200. Demographically almost all working class, whites are the largest group, and blacks and Hispanics, police kill African Americans disproportionately three times the rate of fights. And this is just a tip of the iceberg. Underneath this, there are tens of thousands of injuries, traumatic brain injury, trauma, brutality, torture, so I think the tip of the iceberg metaphor is good here. Great. And the backlash continues. The Democrats have doubled down on law and the applied administration uses every opportunity to promote more cops and spending on policing. Vermont Governor Scott used his inaugural address this month to chastise critics of violent and racially biased policing as endangering public safety. And he's got a bipartisan vocation in the state house. The New York Times ran a heartless propaganda article on Burlington's supposed anti-police problem, and ensuing draft of petty crime. And Burlington Mayor Weinberger claims Democratic oversight of police is a step too far. The dissipation of the Black Lives Matter protests, but not only these, it's also meant that the far right street presence has little opposition. From white nationalist vigilantes against Black Lives Matter, this movement has also demonstrated against teaching about racism in schools, against LGBTQ rights, against reproductive rights, and generally for white nationalism, all uphold traditional gender, racist, and the capitalist social order. In some countries, this has even taken a form looking like fossil fascism, a reactionary fight to protect fossil fuel production and traditional values. Criminalization has been the favorite response of U.S. rulers to the trauma, poverty, and social instability generated by capitalism. The state and capital carried out 50 years of neoliberal cuts to social safety nets and advanced deregulation, tax cuts, and other policies to spur wealth accumulation at the top and inequality for the rest of us. In the U.S., this has been a bipartisan effort. A basic goal has been to restore and maintain profit rates in response to crises of profitability. Internationally as well, ramping up the carceral state, levering around racial oppression, curbing union and democratic rights, has been the protection against shredding working class living standards and futures. And this is one reason that George Floyd uprising was international in scope. Tax rates in the U.S. and federal funding for cities have been cut dramatically since the 1970s. There is much less money for housing, culture, recreation, welfare, education, urban development, health care, children, and public sector union jobs. The relative budgets for policing have increased though. Federal subsidies for prison construction have been enormous. The state will use the legality and violence when necessary to enforce an oppressive social order. This can be explicitly directed against working class power. For instance, Congress's recent suppression of the railroad workers strike last year. And remember, it would have been cops who broke the picket lines for this strike. And less directly, but no less violently and broad sense, the Federal Reserve is raising interest rates intentionally to cause a recession and intentionally to increase unemployment in order to break the power of workers to raise the wages and to resist oppressive working conditions. So these are broad outlines in some markers of the system and dynamics that we're up against. And I want to finally finish up about the moment for it now. We face multiple and interacting crises. Some commentators call this the poly crisis, social, economic, and ecological. The ruling class is banking on repression to protect the status quo distribution of power and wealth. The poly crisis can and is currently producing huge suffering. And importantly for us to come to terms with also pessimism and despair for the future or in the polls. But it also provides a foundation for broader mass struggle. Think of Iran in the fall. Think of Black Lives Matter, I think was part of this. And more against political conclusions in building the left and about the nature of the problem. Capitalism and the alternative abolition and socialism. A big lesson of 2020 is that mass movements and protests are essential for our side to bring things. We need more struggle, less focus on elections, and it's key to build organizations to fight however modest we start. We need to think about, need to think hard and experiment on how to engage broader working class forces. And finally, we need to prioritize anti-racist politics rooted in workplaces and communities that is committed to political independence from the Democrats. Aiming to be able to disrupt normal operations of things. And with a radical horizon for a multi-class, a multiracial class struggle challenging the status quo and toward a different kind of Next up we have Jaina Ossoff. She is the, she is a prison abolition organizer with the Free Her Movement. And it's also, this is working under the National Council for Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls. Please welcome Jaina. It is truly an honor to be here today and speak about how abolition brings us to truly safe and thriving communities. So let's jump into it. As Paul so eloquently described the problem in Vermont, I would like to frame the prison crisis we have. So right now this has proposed to build four new prisons for a cost of $250 million. This prison campus will be able to incarcerate between 2,055 to 2,184 people. And there's a likelihood of massive vet totals being added later down the line. In addition to this, the state has plans to build juvenile secure facilities. So we can really see the state investing heavily in incarceration at this point. And what we know is there's an RFP for this prison which is a request for proposals. And in that they lay out like six options and they went with option C which was this prison campus. And we also know that they have awarded a contract to HOK and two local architectural firms. And just to put this and like this has been done without any community input. So they've just been steamrolling ahead without listening to any of us. And also this path doesn't really make sense because Governor Shumlin funded Justice Reinvestment 2 which is a working group initiative. And that was to identify ways to incarcerate Vermont. And we even experienced a 16% drop in our prison populations after implementing those recommendations. And they've already been awarded $430,000 to do their next round. So it just doesn't make sense that we're going in opposite directions here. And also taking into account that Vermont spent over $168 million annually on our departments of corrections. It's just sending a really big message about our state's priorities for our future. So we're here today because we believe we're in an extremely important moment. And we really want to ask everyone like do we want to continue incarcerating our communities for generations to come? Because these prisons won't just incarcerate us. They'll incarcerate our children and grandchildren. So we also know that prisons don't work. Recidivism rates in Vermont hover around 52.5%. But I have a feeling it's actually much higher than that. And they're so high because people are released and they don't have the support they need. So we believe funding should go to the community because prisons really serve as a revolving door that does nothing but cause further trauma and harm. So also many community groups that are doing alternative work or ranching work in between, I actually have to receive their funding from the Department of Corrections because they're not enough allocated in our general budget for those services. I'm also on the Vermont mail fund and we could bail out essentially half of CRCS if we had the money. And also so many of being held pre-child are there due to technical violations like losing housing, losing a job, losing an appointment. We don't believe people should be in prison but that especially is not a reason to be in prison. So what we know is there's only around 20 folks that really need long-term support and care. And we think that can be done in a facility that doesn't have to look like or be a prison. So also so what we know is it's okay so just to frankness it's important I think for people to be on the same page about what we mean about abolition because these terms have very large and different connotations depending on their exposure to these ideas. I don't think they'll be able to adequately describe all the elements in abolition in this timeframe but I'll definitely focus on some of the most important. I would say the central idea of abolition is that we do not believe these systems can be reformed. We believe prisons and police things, police systems, we're designed to do exactly what they're doing today which is to oppress and control us. So we're turning to the qualified roof rules in Gilmore if you caught it on slide one. Abolition is the absence of prisons in the presence of life-affirming institutions. We don't believe in just opening the doors to prisons and letting everyone run free without a plan or support. Most of us believe in creating community-based care settings that provide wraparound services that actually engage people in dealing with rehabilitation. We really want to create the conditions in society that we think prisons obsolete to begin with and we believe in providing society with the skills they need to navigate conflict and harm independent of state intervention and we also believe in making sure everyone's needs are met. So a tough part in this abolitionist argument is that we do understand that some folks are going to need to be incapacitated for lack of a better word and will have to be taken care of in a setting that might be removed from the community for a while but that setting will always preserve human dignity and prioritize holistic healing. So also to ground Gilmore and what we're doing, some of our goals is that we really strive to create a community-centered world rooted in love in which we fund or we shift funding to housing, healing treatment, the things Paul was talking about that make us successful communities and along the way we really need to redefine harm in the ways we address it. Not all harm is addressed in our current system. If you look at the biggest polluters of this planet their actions are not necessarily deemed illegal yet they are harming people in the environment on such a massive scale. We also believe in integrating approaches to healing, addressing healing without having violence in there and we also want to provide folks with what they need to not only survive but thrive and really start interrupting those cycles of violence and trauma. But yes abolition encompasses so much more but these are the main components and I urge folks to agree we do this to be free of primary cover. So taking these principles and applying it to our own community 95% of folks in CRCS, the women's prison in Vermont have experienced violence. To me we can clearly see there was a social failure there and that folks recovering from trauma are not receiving the supports they need and it's leading them to get entangled in our systems. I believe that prisons do not allow us to address the underlying social problems that are being approached in incarceration and it's actually just a laser banding solution and we believe that decision makers have been experimenting with prisons for centuries and it's our turn to try our methods. We know that this is possible through looking at why they were able to end youth incarceration last year and they were able to do this by moving from a punitive to an indigenous programming system. They established a campus that quote engages youth in activities that give back to the community. They distribute food in their neighborhoods. They work with the local elementary schools. They plan time to hang out with family and friends and in this they become people who contribute care for and belong to the community. So we see that these coalition partners that make this campus were able to end incarceration through integrating indigenous cultural practices and they were saying that for many indigenous Hawaiian youth there the only way to counter over a century of colonization and its systems was to reconnect with their ancestors. So looking at the work on a local level we are free here in Vermont. There's like five of us here. We launched in the fall of 2020 and this is what our work currently encompasses. So right now we are introducing some policy a prison moratorium bill which will halt prison construction for five years. Also I'm not sure folks are aware but there is a school construction moratorium in Vermont that activists have been trying to lift. So we will be adding a lift of that moratorium and our moratorium and we'll also be pushing an elder pro bill and working to program here because that is just a revolving door also. So we just want to work on expanding pathways our prison. Also the basic income guarantees the first step in our reimagining communities program for the state. We also do legal work. We're not doing it formally yet but we will be formally launching our hub this year and that allows us to help community members with their legal cases and support them through that traumatic process. And as always our work will continue to be shifting the narrative. Many people have not had conversations like this yet and we think it's a really important step that's necessary to changing these mainstream ideas about prisons and incarceration and harm. So this is just our fourth month of the campaigning now and we'll constantly be building and evolving so please stay in touch. And just a big thank you from three years ago that you all were here and accepted to this and we really hope to see you at something of an up. All right next up it's going to be Andy Blanchett. Andy is a worker at Howard Center and actually was just recently elected as the president of AFSCME 1674 which is the year being bachelor. He's our vice president. Thank you everybody for coming out and thanks to everyone that's spoken so far. Yeah my name is Andy Blanchett and I'm 29 years old and I'm a resident of Winnieski. I've lived in Vermont my whole life and I work at Howard Center. And what I do is I'm an employment advisor so I work with adult disabilities to find work, competitive work in the community and keep their jobs and help advocate for them at work. So there's a lot of different labor issues that I kind of have seen from different perspectives but Howard Center does a bunch of social services. If you've ever known anyone that works there and you ask if they know someone else, not even send them the time they don't because there's a huge range. You have school supported services, developmental services which is residential, employment-based, community-based, education-based, mental health services that are residential and cute, heart reduction like the clinic and outpatient services. And I'm an expert in what most of my co-workers do at Howard Center but in the union we have the opportunity to come together and talk about our shared struggles. So I want to talk a little bit about the impact of underfunding from the state for the 40 plus years. Agencies have not had enough funding to create the infrastructure or resources available for the increase in community needs. Agencies will explain that they are unable to pay truly liberal wages due to this underfunding let alone enough to retain workers. This is why unionized social service agencies are of the utmost importance. Workers must be able to collectively bargain for wages that we know will retain our co-workers and provide quality services to our community members. The importance of continuity of services. So community members across Howard Center rely on having people who know them to work with them and know what they need and what they want. When there is constant turnover the quality of support inevitably diminishes and community members do not receive the supports that they need. At best this delays growth or attainment of goals. At worst this can put community members receiving services in danger or seriously isolate them from the rest of the community which causes them great harm. This is true across all services. The impact of burnout. When people receiving services are not having their support implemented as needed other workers have to pick up extra work meaning there's too much to do for too many people. When this occurs many uh when this occurs workers will burn out and this will lead to workers leaving. This only worsens the cycle. Not only that this burned out worker can then impact their community's attitude towards the people who need social services. Uh clients who are frustrated at how their needs are not being met may then communicate that verbally and physically to those around them along the community or at school or in a residential setting. Some clients may end up dealing with the car school system rather than getting the right amount of support they need in the first place often leading to the behavior already. The impact of capitalism in class. Meanwhile social workers see the police continue to get increased funding and see plans for a new prison to be created out of the manufactured fear in the community regarding crime. It is a slap in the face and we are all uh all while told explicitly or implicitly that the reward for the work that we do won't come from money and that's just how things are. More social workers are seeing this for what it is. It's a way to divide workers. Still some of us experiencing understaffing in a cute crisis is find ourselves in situations where we're in danger and see the role of police as essential since there are no other solutions currently available. The current structure of social work when designed by the ruling class to fail can easily divide workers and have a support that which goes against ourselves and collective interests. The state has shown again and again for decades that it would rather create the appearance of safety and rehabilitation for the white liberal than actually divest from the root causes of crime and harm which is capitalism. With no sign of divestment from capitalism in sight social services are then put into this gray area since these root causes will fundamentally change um lost my way so sorry yeah uh so since those root causes will fundamentally change social services are viewed as the answer social services are then purposefully underfunded and deemed ineffective. The predetermined answer to that becomes to fund the punitive measures further harm the working class and the cycle continues. The role of labor without strong unions and organizing the current structures structures of designated agencies do not allow for workers input regarding what people receiving services may need and what workers must have to meet those needs. To be clear the voices of those who receive services are often the most stifled in discussions. Designated agencies in Vermont are often led by wealthy white people the same people who bind to the illusion of safety and rehabilitation provided by the personal systems. Workers will need to um will need to push designated agencies away from alignment with said systems through collective organizing. Workers with organizing power allow working class people to both have impact and influence over their working conditions globally and have a say within the legislature. When workers experience a housing crisis particularly for renters at this point this directly impacts our ability to stay at our jobs advocate for ourselves our clients and our fellow workers in addition to our collective ability to advocate within the legislature. Workers and social services are beginning to wake up and see in large part due to this housing crisis how we are all at half step away from being the same supports and services our clients meet. For example if we lose our apartments and our couchsurfing we may need to defend ourselves in the same way our clients may be too. If we are to defend ourselves while being without a home in a vulnerable situation we too could end up losing our jobs and be thrust into the carceral system. The prison industrial complex is a tool by the working class to harm working class people the most and we know that it has been specifically created to target black and brown workers on mass. Labor then must take up the call and work in coalition with fellow working class groups that have been advocating for the abolishment of prisons and police since long before the collective uprising in 2022. Some considerations for this panel it may be helpful trying to get green mountain self advocates and or other self advocacy groups into this discussion it was not long ago that the branded training school existed in the state and though people with disabilities and mental health challenges are often stereotyped as dangerous these demographics of folks are statistically the most likely groups to experience harm by the hands of people in their communities. This is without accounting for the intersections of race and gender. Self advocates are our neighbors our co-workers and they need to be part of this conversation. Thank you. We are going to have Jess. Jess is a part of the police accountability movement that is working to have this accountability board actually put in place here in Burlington. There's actually going to be a vote on this measure coming up soon so very excited to have her speak. After she speaks we are going to have a longer discussion section that I will talk a little bit more how that's going to be formatted in just a moment. All right take your way Jess. Hi there folks who don't know me my name is Jess McCord. I identify with sugar pronouns and I was a part of the battery park movement back in 2020 and continued on in that work in Burlington by working on community control police which is a charter change proposal here in Burlington. I'm no longer a resident of Burlington. I'm not a property owner in the state of Vermont. I am a human being and one of the not wealthy white executive directors of a nonprofit. I hesitate to say my work because I really like believe in this concept of life work and I think that all the different parts of my life are woven together. Some of that being that most of my professional life started in Haiti and I learned actually community organizing from Haitians. Then I kind of found myself back in Vermont and I got involved in the Buck lives matter movement in 2020 here in that shape and form but I hadn't been living in the US for a while and now I do dedicate the majority of my time to initiatives projects groups of people who are creating the conditions that I think will allow abolition to happen and so I just like I think it's super important to contextualize that. I'm going to talk about a very specific ballot item in Burlington that has a very specific purpose which is very different I think from the breadth of what we've talked about on this panel and the vision for the future. So I am an active member of the Vermont Relief Collective which is an affinity space for BIPOC remoteers to engage around land and our foodways and to share our lives together and to be more visible in ways that aren't harmful. I'm also a part of the every town BIPOC land access project and that is a really essential vision for Vermont that believes that BIPOC people exist in every town of Vermont now and into the future by putting a parcel of land into permanent trust for perpetuity under our Catholic society. And when I come to the work in Burlington I think about creating the conditions for people to thrive and unfortunately community control of police is not a service. It does not provide alternatives to policing. It acknowledges that policing exists in our city and in our current political climate our city is not ready to move beyond policing and in those conditions we are fighting for an accountability system for the police to have to operate within which is of course just like all the other things that we've talked about in the front to our system as it is and so the backlash is very understandable but my hope is that for folks who are here who listen to this that there's an understanding of what this ballot measure is talking about that there's clarity about what it has the ability to do and what it doesn't have the ability to do it is not a defund measure for example it is not chasing police officers out of town it is not reducing the number of officers on the force however when this came about there were other asks on the table specific to Burlington and of course our words will always be twisted just really quickly how familiar are folks with community control of police the charter change ballot proposal okay so I'm not going to like test you on the five main but I thought that that can help to move things along a little bit in what I'm sharing so I'm a part of people for police accountability and has marked with a lot of other groups of people essentially no I would say anyone who's concerned who's a concerned resident and and is willing to organize around community control police is a part of people for police accountability but essentially I just want to orient us we are talking about a charter a city charter change and I'll talk about the full process but this proposal is a specific removal and substitution of language in the city charter so it currently says that the chief of police has sold power to make disciplinary decisions that has to do with hiring firing and discipline of all kinds and and only this and the only case in which the city council and mayor are elected officials step in as if the chief is being invested in and to be very clear the police commission was created in earlier iterations of movements looking to bring accountability to policing in Burlington as it did across many other cities but it has an advisory role so I think it's really important to understand the five main principles which are disciplinary power investigatory power independence representation and transparency and these kind of five pillars were something that were built into the proposal through research about what has led to effective community oversight in other cities or other proposals that were on the table at the time in the fall of 2020 I think I resonate a lot with what Jena said of like our society has been experimenting with prisons and the car show system for many many years and we have very little funding and a length of time that we've been actually been able to implement these alternatives. Disciplinary power is number one that's the most direct substitution in our current city charter that this body the community oversight board would take over from the chief of police and this might be in all cases it would be targeted to cases of misconduct so not dealing with an officer showing up late to work on a repeated basis or not following other parts of kind of their handbook and their rules but specifically around misconduct and this might be behind misconduct but it also can be patterns of abuse of power and that is something that we are seeing live in order to fight community control of police the police department and the mayor collude to create a situation in which residents feel less safe and where they aren't even offering the service that they're supposed to offer and so I just want to make sure that we're taught because a lot of people are like well there haven't been violence in this business there have the other the investigatory power is important because it removes investigation from within the very body where these employees are coming from and something I want to highlight in in between investigatory power independence is that currently if you would like to report misconduct of a police officer you have to report that to BPD and this body and you know technically they have administrators and you can like send an email you can like do other things create some level of distance but this body would be able to field these these cases of misconduct and I believe that is the that will allow us to have a more full narrative about the level and extent of misconduct in policing in Burlington and I would love to see this across the state I currently live somewhere um that we're under the jurisdiction of the state police and we know they also have their own their own issues um independence also has to come also has a key part to play in around legal counsel for this community oversight board to have independent legal counsel where the interests are of the people and not just of the city's bottom line um representation very long very convoluted and also very important we often find similar to the nonprofits who are working on these social services being led by people who are not from the working class who are white privilege in a number of ways we want representation in particularly because we're talking about policing we've identified lived experiences and identities that are more likely to have interactions with the police and I think Andy you like your whole cycle is like I don't use it last year very long that's what we're talking about because of lived experience and identities there are people who have a more direct experience of policing even in my life as a light-skinned middle-class black person um I do not have direct interaction with the police on a frequent basis and I think that's an important distinction that I that a lot of people don't understand is policing is a concept to some and policing is a lived experience to others um and then transparency so this is a public board and it will be subject to those um statues so I know I'm running out of time um and I don't have more slides the last kind of couple of things that I wanted to mention is that it's great and I love talking to folks like you all but ultimately when we take these larger concepts of abolition of defunding the police of all these kinds of reforms um where where we can get in the fight is often at a local level and it's also not where people feel the most comfortable to get in the fight in 2020 everyone was saying talk to your racist family member I want to ask the people in this room to talk to the moderate middle in your life your supervisor at work your co-worker your neighbor who you sometimes get in issues with at the condo association uh to the the everyday moderate middle that we I am assuming many people in this room are progressive that we actually swim in every day I personally I don't have energy to talk to our racist family members but what I'm asking people in Burlington to do is before February 15th is when like mail-in voting happens and March 7th is when we vote on this proposal we have to be willing to have those conversations so we can have a more representative representative picture about what's happening with policing in Burlington and not just the sound banks that morrow goes back to all the time so thank you just thank you again to all of our panel members that was fantastic