 And we'll get started. Welcome everybody to the NPA for wards four and seven. Got a great agenda tonight. I wanted to start with introductions and kind of move the mic around to do that. I mean, Yeah, good. We're going to start over there. Just started that corner. Martha Malthus, Ward seven. Bob Hooper, Ward four. Mark Barlow, North District City Councilor Ward four. Cliff Cooper, Ward four. Ellen Cooper, Ward four. Frank Bozak, Ward four. Matt Hurlbert, Ward seven and steering committee. Kenya Kenny, Ward four. We have our own. Just it's okay. Thank you for sharing. Actually, why don't you do Sarah. Sarah Carpenter, Ward four city councilor. Seven. Good evening, Scott Rogers, CEDA community development manager. Hi everyone, Emma Mulvaney, Sanic Ward three, but I'm the state representative for 17, which goes out to the Ethan Allen Parkway and the shopping closet. And you already met me. I'm M my pronouns are they them and I'm Ward four. Olivia Taylor steering committee member and Ward seven. Lee Morgan, Ward seven. I almost forgot their pronouns they them and also on the steering committee. Not from here. I'm from East Montpelier. I work in the attorney general of the office director of the civil rights union. My name is Jeff Clark. I'm the moderator tonight. Urgent will be timekeeper running some some life sentence. We can too. And we're like scary. And Bridget Bozak wonderful work for steering committee. So we'll get started and see if there are any announcements. I'm here to let people know that. Once again, the Heineberg Center is going to be having a walk of ages this year. It's on Saturday, May 20th. From 10 to 12. This is a really important fundraiser for the center, which has a lot of activities for the community and especially for senior members of our area. It also is a provider of food. And as you know, food insecurity is a major problem. These days. So if you're interested, I'm going to pass this around for you to see the details. And if you're interested, if you would, the best thing to do would be to go to the center, which is at 14 Heineberg Road. And get some more specifics and get your questions answered. Thank you. I do. I am organizing the National Eating Disorder Association walk, which is the Sunday, April 30th at 10am at Main Street landing performing arts center. We have acts throwing a photo booth. We have lots of snacks and great amazing prizes, like stays at Hotel Vermont and other things. You can come and you don't have to walk. It's a very accessible short walk. So it's more of an event than a walk. So when people use the microphones, it's not necessary to get it. You see how far it goes. Bring it up and down. You get too close to the store. But if you just go down, you know, like this. Because you can't really hear your voice. Yeah, I think there are some people online who want to introduce them. We've had just one. Yep. Would you like to introduce yourself on Zoom? Hi, I just, I just figured out that you're talking to the folks on camera. I think that the audience a little bit hard. Couldn't get all that till now. I think that's better. Hi, I'm Annie Blossom. I live in Niagara, Florida. And I'm glad to see a lot of folks here. I have a toddler. But I'm looking forward to it. Glad you're here. We'll get started. We're going to start off with a presentation. I think we're going to start off with a call. She's not. She's not. Speaking my time, I guess I said. Annie, can you hear with the microphone that far away? Or who? But it's just kind of a lot of things. Great. Would you like me to start? Yeah. Hi. So thanks again, everybody for coming out. So I work in the. One of the units in the attorney general's office. That's called the civil rights unit. The attorney general is the chief law enforcement. Office of the state of Vermont. We worked with Vermont state police and fish and wildlife and other agencies, but we also. We prosecute cases in our criminal division. We protect Vermont's environment and seek environmental justice in our environmental law division. We go after scammers and unfair business practices in our consumer protection divisions. We also represent all the different state agencies ranging from transportation, DMV. Human services and the like. And the civil rights unit. Our job really falls into a few large buckets. So I want to talk about just what we do. And then I'll talk about these, these forums that we've been doing around the state. And really want to hear your take on, on what we're doing or what we're trying to find out. So civil rights unit. We have several core functions. One is that. We are the top law enforcement or enforcement. Entity for employment discrimination in the state of Vermont. So all employers with one or more employees are subject to a variety of laws that. Band, all kinds of discrimination, unequal pay, harassment and so forth in the workplace. And we have the ability to take complaints from the public. Do investigations and in appropriate cases, take those cases to court. If we can't get the employer to agree to change their practices. We have a mediation program that allows parties to try to come together and work things out. Try to stay out of court whenever possible. Just get people to work together productively. So that's one area that we work on. Another area that we work on. That relates more to this. The subject tonight is we. Also involve our enforced for months laws. Regarding what are called hate crimes. I hate crime. It's just. Is a crime. But that has that's motivated by bias against the victim. By either who that, you know, what they look like, who they love, where they worship or not worship. Or whether they're merely perceived. You know, a person of one type or the other. Under Vermont law. Crimes are of course subject to punishment. But if it's motivated by hate. Vermont law provides stiffer penalties. It also provides. Civil penalty. So if you suffer property damage, some people feel they have to move to be safe. And so they suffer economic harm. As well as maybe physical or not. Or if you're a person of one type or the other. And so they suffer economic harm. As well as maybe physical or emotional harm. We have the ability to go and seek justice. On that end. And not, and not whether or not. The person at arrested ends up being convicted of a crime. We can still pursue that kind of justice. We also work with an advocate who is. You know, highly trained and, and, and dealing with survivors of all kinds of violence, all kinds of harm. And so she, she, she's, you know, comes from Burlington. She's the work in Burlington. She herself has a kind of a personal stake in this. She herself came to the United States. And received asylum for persecution from, from her home country and connects very, very well with those folks. And when we have interactions with people who are facing harm in the community, often before we stick a lawyer in front of their face. We have them go to our advocate and, you know, we have to take care of them. We have to take care of them. We have to take care of them. Whatever their immediate needs are, whether they need a safety plan for work, whether they feel like they're not safe in their house. What their children may need. What, you know, there's, if there's students, what, what pathways they can open up for. For students. And then we may work on, if there's a complaint, we may work to see if there's an investigation that, to us. I also teach at the police academy, so every police officer in Vermont who's been certified since 2009 has had to go through my class where I teach them how to take these kinds of complaints seriously, how to look themselves for indicators of maybe a bias crime or a hate crime, and how to conduct those investigations and recognize what kind of fear multiplier these kinds of offenses are because of the hallmark of a hate crime. And one reason there's a higher penalty is because it not just harms the victim or the survivor of whatever the act is, but also people in that community. And that's true for communities nationwide. I mean, if something happens in another state and it makes the news, let's say, I mean, recent years, some acts of anti-Semitism in Massachusetts, it sends a ripple effect throughout the whole country. Some acts throughout the whole world for the Jewish community because they feel they're part of that group being targeted and people wonder when it's when or if it's going to be directed at them. So we train law enforcement and try to get them to understand. And I'm actually doing refresher training for every police officer in the state of Vermont this year on bias incidents and hate crimes. Again, to make sure that they're getting out there with their eyes open, their ears open, their hearts open, take these complaints seriously and learn how to work with us. In other agencies, I'll talk about in a moment to respond to acts of hate, even if they're not crimes, there still may be harm that's going on that we want to try to work on. So we do that. We also get involved in litigation at the national level on civil rights issues. So you know, since I've been in civil rights, we worked on the marriage equality cases in connection with New York and Connecticut. It resulted into successful Supreme Court decisions recognizing marriage equality for the whole country. In the last administration, I think I was involved with a dozen or more lawsuits dealing with various human rights issues that surfaced in the immigration context. And many of those were successful as well. And we also may be asked by other parts of the country if they're facing legal challenges, if there's going to be a court challenge in their state, and that can deal with issues that relate to LGBTQ issues that's active right now as you're obviously aware, we will get involved or be invited to submit a brief or participate in a brief supporting another organization's efforts to overturn or to challenge those laws often on constitutional grounds, basically equal protection for all. And so we will get involved in those as well. The last function that we perform and give a representative here who can attest to that is that we're often present in the legislature either work providing some technical assistance on laws that come, you know, within our authority or advocating to expand the laws. Today I spent most of my day in committee supporting legislation that would provide even stronger protections against harassment of workers or customers, people facing discrimination in public. And, and then I was in another committee on a bill that is looking at that the intent of the bill is to limit and eliminate law enforcement's use of deception if they're interrogating a juvenile. There's good science that has been brought out in testimony that young people in particular because of brain development issues are susceptible to providing false compassions. And so we're trying we're working with folks who try to sensitize law enforcement to that and click create clear guardrails on what is permitted and what's not permitted. I'm sorry my phone is lighting up. So that's part so that's part of what we do in the civil rights unit. Could I ask the zoom folks if you can hear okay. Excuse me, sure. Yes, yes. Thank you. Great. So, since 2019 and we had a brief interruption with the pet well brief. That's a wrong word. We had an interruption with the pandemic. There's a lot of things were interrupted. Well, but we started in 2019. Just going to different parts of the state and talking to them about what we do in the in kind of the hate crime and bias incidents space and the things that we can do in the people we work with and I'm going to elaborate on that in a little bit as you know, and maybe through Q&A we can do a little bit more of that. But just going around communities and asking them like okay so what are we missing so people call us. We developed a system I'll talk about in a little bit. We're in 2019 we developed kind of a network that's headquartered in our office among law enforcement in the states of the state's attorneys and police if they get a call about some act of bias even if it's not a crime, even if it doesn't violate any law, but someone is alleging as you know there's something going on in the community that has a bias element that they share that information with us because the law enforcement the police department historically here and pretty much everywhere I mean in the country it's changing slowly Vermont's part of the change is that if they can't arrest someone, you know historically law enforcement think okay well sorry we can't do anything. And so a few years back we went to law enforcement and to the county prosecutors and said well you can do something which is let us know about it and see if we can find the right people to address because something might not be a crime but it still might be housing discrimination and we have a stated agency the Human Rights Commission that are experts in housing discrimination that's what they do that's their job they your taxes pay them to take housing discrimination case and find justice for people facing you know barriers to housing. So we just said so we understand you can't arrest the person but let us know what's going on and we'll we'll contact folks and see where you know where we can find them a remedy or if it doesn't violate any law it might be or you don't want to take someone to court. Let us know about it because we have relationships with folks who work at community justice centers because sometimes an assistant attorney general showing up in his dark blue suit in a community where there's a conflict you know I'm just kerosene on the fire right you call the attorney general's office office you know that's not a way to bring peace and community sometimes so we try to work with people who who know the parties who live in the communities sometimes they're community justice professional sometimes they're librarians who know both parties to the conflict you know what they were both kids in the kids library and grew up together so we just want them to share that information with us and and sometimes it's an unsolved crime and so we may share the information with our counterparts and they're in Burlington here the United States Attorney's Office from the U.S. Department of Justice who might also share it with the FBI because it might be that a particular crime committed in this town in this part of the state is unsolved but it might very well match another crime where we have a suspect description in another part of the state and so part of the job that communicating that information is to try to connect the dots because and because we found law enforcement wasn't doing that they were focused at most on their county and certainly not talking to their federal partners so we share that information with our federal partners and it's particularly helpful when when the crimes involve online harassment which can come from outside of the state of Vermont FBI have terrific people who are very good at you know cyber sleuthing these cases and trying to figure out where the harm's coming from can't solve every case but you know if the complaint originally goes to a police department that has four officers there isn't much chance that they're going to have the resources or expertise to know that you can even do anything there but if it comes to us under this system we call the bias incident reporting system we can get it in front of the right set of eyes and maybe they can work on the case and if it's not a state case that might have agents in that state who can pursue the case further where Vermont can't so the idea really is is just to let people know that we're doing this we had never done this before 2019 it was kind of on an ad hoc basis but we wanted to make it more systematic it's voluntary it's not required by state law but we you know we are just developing those relationships and police departments I think are finding that it helps them one they solve more cases and two they aren't just being the bearers of bad news to somebody saying sorry there's nothing we can do it's true they can't arrest but they can refer it to us and we'll try we can't resolve every case but but we consider that's part of our job so these fora that we started in 2019 was basically to let people know that we're we're in that business that we do that and then also to find out from them like if they aren't reporting things why not is it hard some people have reported back to us some of the barriers that they face and then we try to work on those insights so look at ourselves but also talk to law enforcement and also frankly there was a change in law that came out of ideas that came out of 2019 forums prosecutors thought the standard for proving a hate crime was really high and she had at the time it said you had to show it was maliciously motivated by by bias and that's hard to prove because sometimes people do things for a bunch of different reasons right we in the law business we call that mixed motives where it could be that you bumped into my car and I'm mad about that but then we get out of the car and you know if I have biases of me and I see who it is that dumped in my car now I'm mad for two reasons and maybe I'm motivated to make a crime either a threat or an act of violence for two reasons and prosecutors were saying they felt a little boxed in and so the like and so um the legislators you know we're included in on that and we advocated and supported a legislation that came through the legislature that expressly said look it's it still can be a hate crime if it's if bias is part of the motivation even if it's not the main motivation but if you could show it motivated you know that that criminal act even if there were other reasons uh that you know it's still it's still fault within the law and that allows us to cast a wider net on cases where we can seek remedies in court and gave prosecutors a little a little bit more breathing room and a little bit more willingness we hope for them to take cases that previously they thought it's the standard it's just it's just tough it's it still is tough to prove why people do stuff um prosecutors don't have to prove uh in a bank robbery case you don't have to prove why the robber bank robbed the bank right they just have to prove that you did it and you knew what you were doing but your motivation isn't part of it what hate crimes motivation is it's kind of the part that that makes it you know that's the the aggravating part that's what makes it worse is that is that bias motivation so it's not always easy to prove um but you know as a direct result of that feedback that received in those for us the Vermont law changed um today I get just as a just as an aside on the on the civil rights bill I was sitting in today there was an amendment that has to do with protecting kids in schools I don't know it's it's going to be voted on tomorrow I can't predict how it's going to come out but I will tell you in the committee room the my own assessment of that additional protection of like that getting through the committee completely changed today not because you know there were lawyers talking and not me but other lawyers were talking about the law and so forth um but what really moved the needle there were three parents talking about their kids experience completely I mean when you think about does a community have a voice in the legislature there's no quite these parents and and they were all moms uh the ones I saw and they were just galvanizing and their the experiences that they related um just connected with everyone and I mean to me I just saw a complete change in what I think how people were looking at it not just from the technical legal side but from the human side so I just want to put for providing feedback to your legislature and your legislators on things that matter to you because in a state like Vermont where people are a lot more accessible than my former home state California where it's like you know that you know everybody has a driver and they got you know all the big staff and everything it's you know it's not it's not like that here and I gotta say it was just a really remarkable thing I could not not remark on that terrific testimony that we saw today but anyway so we so we're going around the state which restarted it after the pandemic has eased back a little bit and we did um in 2022 we did uh for we started off in Rutland and we went to we went to Bennington um and um we have one that's coming up um in um in Orange County in Randolph um May 8th that's our next one uh and we're going to keep doing them um we also did one in St. Albans that was our last one that we did and we did our first one this year to get ideas from people about what's what's what's keeping you back if there are things to report um do you want options other than going straight to law enforcement going somewhere else and what would what would that look like um do you have have you had experiences where it didn't work um and then people were some people felt when they were some people felt comfortable sharing their own experiences we're not asking people to like march out their pain in front of us that's not the point but we certainly are you know going to be listening to that um and just trying to problem solve and get ideas that's really that's really the whole point and we're going to do one of these for uh Chittenden County um you know and it'll be bigger and we usually invite the city officials to make sure they're hearing what we're hearing um as well as legislators um but you know I was at I was at just a meeting in Burlington dealing with issues City Hall is grappling with in terms of supporting the trans community um and you know I heard about these meetings that you had I I've never heard of them before I think it's great and um we were asked if we were our office was interested I'm just like yeah where I'm when we'll go we we work evenings obviously we go on weekends um so we'll go out to events on Saturdays or Sundays um it's pretty standard that's when people can come right because they they're not at work um so that's really what I'm here for is just to let you know a little bit about what we do um and kind of what we see is our mission which is to try to solve more problems um and get out of that kind of rigidity that people in government can have about this is my lane you know I'm a lawyer and you know and so if I can't go to court what can I do it's not there there's things we can do um and and we're trying um and we're learning a lot um about how much how many solutions actually come from the community and not from a lawyer's desk that's been the great lesson in the last few years is how many more cases are getting solved at that local you know non-court track um and so and we've we've met some terrific people who've been doing this their whole lives and frankly we were just doing the work in parallel with each other and now and now I think we're we're interacting and learning to work together I'm gonna stop I've been talking for a while um so yeah so I'll stop there I don't know if there are questions about what we what we do and there's more information but you know I'll just ask let people's curiosity kind of dictate the course so people have thoughts about the subject or questions or suggestions about how we can be better at what we say we're trying to do I'm not here so you mentioned that there is a differential between hate crimes and not hate crimes and that they're stiffer penalties and would that be for felonies only or would that be for both misdemeanors and felonies because there's there's kind of a curious thing that's happening uh now I've been I haven't seen this but I've been reading about that there's somebody's posting a bunch of anti-trance stickers now that's actually vandalism you know there's people could get in trouble but there's other people posting stickers too and so would would there conceivably be a a difference in how these people different people would be treated and then if there is would anybody have the right to complain that it was maybe a speech issue that if the differential was only applied because these people were posting stuff that wasn't liked that people who read it didn't like it yeah sure so I mean you asked that was I think there was like three questions in there and so I'll try to get all of them um so first going with the hate crimes law it applies to all crimes so and on the criminal side if it's a if you do have a crime that's going to criminal court um it basically what it does is it increases the penalty so a misdemeanor in Vermont um some crimes are like low level misdemeanors are punishable by up to a year in prison some misdemeanors are punishable by up to two years but are still considered misdemeanors beyond two years it's a felon so um in Vermont if you commit a hate a hate crime misdemeanor like spray paint someone's car with a racial slur say um that might be a misdemeanor malicious destruction of property um if it if it's if it has a hate crime enhancement it goes if it's punishable by one year it goes to two years um if it's punishable by two years it moves into the felony category um and and some felonies are punishable by up to five years it can be bumped up to 10 or more years depending on the seriousness of the crime so so no crimes are are exemptly um and so that's that's the first thing the second is um whether or not something is a crime like like the use of stickers for example under Vermont state law one of the definitions for um like destruction of properties you have to have some destruction so the question for a sticker like if you had a post-it note for example and it's easily removable and there's no damage to the sign or whatever the property is it wouldn't meet the definition of a crime because there's no property damage other stickers might cause damage and then the state law identifies like well you know how extensive is the damage to see how serious the crime would be so it so it sort of depends on not the content not what's on the sticker but like how bad a damage the sticker is like spray painting is that's a crime right because that we know that causes damage um but the content was to harm people well i'll get to that so so i mean some some speech now we're talking about the content which is speech now some speech is constitutionally protected and some isn't so some speech um are called true threats where it's a threatened to harm someone it's a serious expression to harm someone um that's a felony in vermont um a statement uh that's not directed at someone well let me ask another crime if you use speech to invite someone else to commit violence so you're not threatening to do it but you're trying to incite someone else to commit something and it's said in a way that you know it's intended to motivate that person and it's likely that you know they may act even if they don't but it's it was said in a context where it's likely to produce that revolt uh that's also a crime uh and depending on what the criminal act is if it's you know you're inciting someone to commit a misdemeanor well that that's a misdemeanor if it's inciting them to commit an act of violence that could be a felony um so that is that's that there's good law on on first amendment law on that type of speech how to identify what speech crosses the line so when something is not exaggeration or expression of emotion um insulting yeah i'll get to insulting in a second but so like when we're talking about but so there are fine distinctions in the law about what counts as a threat or not that come from supreme court cases um but if you're if you are if it's speech where it's just a racial slur about a group of people or something that's you know expresses bigotry it's not directed anyone it's not um that's that's not a crime a lot of that is constitutionally protected um but not but not if you commit a crime in expressing it so just because i can constitutionally say out loud you know any american say out loud can say a racial slur doesn't mean that if you deface a building with spray paint that it's protected because the crime is defacing a building with spray paint regardless of what the message is and if it and if it's someone's house that was spray painted so you committed the crime you deface their house and and you can show that it was motivated by your bias against them then then it's a hate crime it's a higher level of penalty um and so you know these speech issues can be very difficult um and to to prove and um united states is unlike a lot of states like uh or a lot of places in the world where what we call hate speech in america is kind of a a converse uh colloquial term it's not there's not a legal definition of hate speech whereas in canada and other and in europe it is um there are there are you know having racial insulting a race and in some countries in europe holocaust denial is a crime um that's not true in the united states that's not true under the first amendment and so that's something that when we work in the area of civil rights or in law enforcement part of our job is to follow constitution we can't do things in violation of the constitution that makes us unlawful after and so we have to make we have to make some of those difficult decisions um but it's not about you know personal distaste for something it's a when we're looking at hate crime we're like does it is it a crime or not and if so can we prove the motivation sometimes it's obvious sometimes it's not but it is um it's a very it's a very complicated area and that's why you know like we we spend hours with law enforcement because they're not lawyers and most lawyers i know who don't practice in the area they don't they can't immediately know the answer um it's complicated and um and that can be frustrating for for folks when they find out where the law ends but on the stickering issue i'll just say something that i said and sorry for people who've heard me say it before here's the important thing that that we try to get out in that the constitution doesn't stop government from helping the victim so if you can't put someone in jail because they directed racial slurs at a community um maybe you can't lock that person up but that doesn't mean that you just go home and say well first amendment tough the government has a the government has free speech rights the government can and the government can go and do something to support those victims um maybe you because the first amendment says you can't make the perpetrator pay that doesn't mean that they have to bear the cost of the harm because we all benefit from the first amendment right so our our perspective is that the community that enjoys the first amendment protections i think really should be aware of the fact that we're the first amendment prohibits you from going after the bad actor here the cost of you're enjoying the first amendment is being born by the victim of that speech and why is that we don't do that with floods like we have FEMA for floods right the government it's not people's fault that you know in many cases that their house flooded and yet we the government steps in to help people in catastrophes and the government has similar power at least not not barred by the first amendment to support victims and so i think you're seeing in burlington like a response to some of that like by having folks in the community be more vocal and and providing more support because that means a lot and we're just trying to get out of the get the car out of the stitch where like if it's the first amendment says you can't you know make the perpetrator pay then you can't do anything that's not true and that's a big part of what we're trying to do is to figure out okay what can we do to support people if that door is closed to us by the courts we're not going to be able to open that door but but we're still here and so let's we we know what we can't do what can we do that's the question we're trying to answer so so i thought it's a long response in my opinion i have a quick question and comment this is so encouraging what you just touched on that there is an area that exists between someone not being able to be arrested and doing nothing that there is like some middle ground there and that's so encouraging because i think any of us who i do a lot of community advocacy with social justice stuff and and it does seem that if you if you hit this wall where someone cannot be charged with doing harm then that's the end of the road so i'm really encouraged by this and how do we get um in contact with you in your office if there are um issues we want pursue i think you you could easily just google vermont attorney general civil rights unit also i see and i'm i'm hoping that she'll cooperate i'm seeing on zoom rachel jolly from burlington community justice um who i consider an expert in this kind of problem solving that we're talking about and so i don't know rachel if it is permitted for me to ask her to chip in um rachel could you help us out there sure yeah the community the burlington community justice center which is part can you hear me okay um we are part of the community and economic development office of burlington we're located in a different building 200 church street is where we're at and our website is burlingtoncjc.org in terms of contact information and having a sense of our scale and scope of programs um we certainly want to be a resource for crime and harm in burlington and um and actually we um with some of our programs we serve all of chinning county so while we don't have any magic bullet answers because generally these crime you know these harms are and these incidences can really vary widely and have all kinds of nuance we do have a lot of resources to play with we have a program for victims of crime that is parallel to the criminal justice system so whether you're reporting a crime or not whether you're involving police at not or not if you're a victim of crime we're we're able to help in that way and also we are really wanting to be community based and so receptive to what we're hearing from community members and i see in the audience um really great examples of active community members who brought an issue to our attention who said you know we want a city response and we can do our best in convening different players different stakeholders that might be part of a solution and again sometimes we just need to come together in order to brainstorm because sometimes the the victim or victims or the folks who feel impacted don't have the exact answer themselves of what they need or want they just know that something's not right they want more justice and together sometimes through brainstorming and through amazing efforts by community members we come up with some solutions and again i i see some of the members in this audience have been part of some of those processes and and that can be ongoing so it's not necessarily one time that they're looking for this one thing and then it's checked off solved it can be an ongoing issue and i think you know julio bringing up the anti-trans stickering um incident is a great example of that because nationally and uh locally um we're seeing ongoing impacts of the various ways that the lgbtq community is being attacked and questioned and threatened um with various laws etc so these are not necessarily just okay let's deal with the stickering it's more of this ongoing issue of showing support for various communities and so um the cjc has one more program that i'll just um call out which is called the conflict assistance program or cap um and that's more individual like neighborhood disputes etc if bias is a part of that we're going to be looking at it really differently in terms of power dynamics that might be in a room between the various parties calling in different um people that we might not have on staff but that we feel do have the expertise that are needed for a given situation so i do just want to highlight that if we don't have the um resources at hand we are committed to trying to find them in at at various levels of community and that doesn't have to be in the o5 401 zip code you know we can again we search in county but we have stakeholders that are statewide and um different partners including the ago's office so um i guess that's repetitive ago the o is the office so including the ago so hopefully that gives you a good good platform of learning a little bit more about us but i'm happy to answer questions as well i do have a is this the right okay cool um so i guess i this past summer had a black lives matter in trans uh trans people belong signs that were both uh destroyed and i found in the in the woods near me um and i did report that using the police department uh whatever system online um and then a few weeks later i got a notification that it was resolved i never got any anyone reaching out to me or emailing me or calling me or any of that um so i guess that's my feedback for uh i tried to report or at least let let them know about a crime not necessarily crime a biased incident possibly um and never heard anything back i mean i don't know like to me it sounds like the department didn't contact our office because we contact everybody okay and usually the first point of contact with our office is from armino medich who's our victim's advocate um we don't that we don't just send emails and i don't even know what resolved means um i mean i i kind of a point of advocacy that we're working on in our office and this is something that because this program is voluntary there's no state law we can't make a police department do it there's no consequences that they can't and so we just have to use kind of our power at the pulpit to make sure people are um are not missing these things and that that's not just officers that's also dispatchers um you know as well as management and town managers and all representatives um but you know because we have that role in the law enforcement system where they can share information to us that's not public record because it's a criminal investigation um and so as you know i mean anyone who's read anything in the news in the past few years i mean there's more than one kind of uh uh intersection with you know terrorism threats right i mean the justice department um is really focusing on a lot of lost ground that they had on white supremacist terrorist threats in the country so that that's that would be my guess i mean i'd like to follow up with you afterwards but um that that would be my guess is that it didn't know because we get signed um um um you know notices all the time and we respond to them yeah go make your sort of multi-fold answer and i can't say why it wasn't responded but we do know um in burlington we have a function where you can report these things particularly like the sticking that's called c-click fix so we strongly encourage that we've just added a category or the city's added a category where it's hate speech or looks like hate speech so now when you do c-click fix that should be a category and i'm gonna i'm gonna look to rachel a little bit to ask maybe she could facilitate now that we're collecting the information that it it maybe get put over to your office because c-click fix is a lot of things like reporting potholes and stuff but now that we have this sort of hate speech thing as a function maybe we could do a better job of making sure it gets funneled through so that's perfect that was what i was going to say is i love c-click yes my biggest component and that is the most exciting thing just as a sidebar comment um because this was something the city council brought up in a resolution and the pushback was well you can't um record free speech and that's not what or prosecuted or track it i guess the insinuation was that we were going to be tracking well we are going to track it if if somebody stole your signs that's exactly what we want to track if if you have stickers near you that's exactly what we want to track so it's not against the person it's is there a pattern of where this is happening how often is it happening and the more we can get that that i'm not sure it will get us to a right answer but it still helps a lot yeah i i think uh oh please go ahead we finished um i have a question um before the crime is committed or the crime is identified as a crime um my question centers around the role of social media and the organization of that free speech is a is a social media tweet email whatever all the others aren't facebook um expressing hate clearly against anyone but a minority group is that free speech but if it is it is in an organized fashion it is not me telling you my bias or my hate against someone in a casual conversation it is a use of a technology tool a technology that is regulated by state government is it your office that might be tracking this kind of potential crime using social media we are involved in that and we we worked very closely with the fbi and that i i can't get into details because some of his trade crafts so to speak um but one of the things i teach law enforcement at the academy is that i might give them an introduction to the dark web and familiarize them them uh with different social media sites where organized groups are known to use that as an organizing tool um so just to speak very at a very general level there are there are many many hate groups in the world um we use social media that is consumed by the united states but that the people who are posting like in germany for example um most of them don't use twitter they use different websites that they create to recruit people um and i'm not going to name it because i don't want to give them free publicity so to speak um and it's it's deeper than that in terms of recruiting because they use heavy metal music um there are people around the world and in the united states who use who who know how to develop violent video games that re-enact acts of violence against you know marginalized communities as a way of trying to bring children to desensitize them to jet ideas about genocide and racial and religious hatred so it's it's very multifaceted and we also not only work with law enforcement on on that and the federal authorities have many more resources than we do it but we also work with um folks who work in the private space so um a few years back i went for a training part of the training was to meet with the internet special specialist at the simon besenthal center in los angeles um all states attorney general's offices were there so it wasn't just for brumont my colleagues in mississippi and florida main and new hampshire were there so that they were teaching us more about the dark web and and about where to look the southern poverty law center has an amazing database of racist tattoos and graffiti there's a lot of symbolism a lot of numerical hints so that you look so it's something that looks like a number or someone who's in a photograph is displaying numbers those numbers refer maybe to hitler or to some other message that that group subscribes to um so we do try to use all of those tools and um you know we were like we we partnered with we talked to the southern poverty law center um uh we also talked with the um we talked with the uh anti-defamation league the adl and boston about incidents to see whether where we have unsolved cases in particular do they have activity on the border you know the vermont borders um it's a lot of work and and um it requires a lot of knowledge and um and part of the reason that we got involved in this space is because so many of our departments are just small they're just small and they don't have the they don't have the resources i i know many departments they have one detective and it's usually the chief who you know who's got a running department um and so that's why we want them to get on our radar so we can get it if we need experts to get it to the experts um but uh the twitter's only the tip of the iceberg i have to say yeah um so i know that you said that there isn't like any legal obligation for like the police departments in the state that they have to report incidences of bias even if it's not a crime that they don't have to report it to you beyond it obviously not being law is there like any reason it couldn't be like we would love to be you know we would love it to be and um a few years ago in the vermont senate there was a bill that was introduced and the judiciary committee that would it would mandate reporting of hate crimes it's not that's not even required in vermont law it's in most states it's not um some states do require it um and the committee you know and and the bill started going forward and there were certain things that we wanted to see added for example if we're doing an investigation we don't know who it is we wanted subpoena power because sometimes when you have an act of hate in schools i can't get i can't we had a college case okay where someone made a paper mache news in a college campus um all we needed to know was like who's in the building at what time because we didn't have security camera footage so we just wanted to work backwards and because of federal privacy law the school said what we know who are in the buildings if you give us a subpoena we can give you the names otherwise if we don't have a subpoena you're we're violating federal law so we couldn't get the list of names that way we had to do something else so we just talked to students trying to figure out that way we did you know photo lineups using different social media sites where people had friends to figure out what people were there so we had to work our way around it um but ultimately the bill just didn't go forward i think there was debates about well who gets to decide what gets reported and who gets to say and that sort of thing and and our office's view is like those aren't unsolvable problems um but you know i think for us we would like to see that i think um and what we do in the meantime is that we just we educate and we talk about it um i just you know i just met with a police chief just a couple of days ago i'm and i met with the chief um a few months ago in person for the first time he kind of knows my name so i have a distinctive name uh at least for around here i do um it's not distinctly aware my former home um uh and and we started getting stuff from that department that we probably hadn't seen in a year right we saw like three within two weeks it's not because new stuff was happening it's just like yeah okay the chief chief gets what we're doing and and they're and they're pushing it they're pushing it down to the people we can do better at that um but um but yeah it is it can be a frustration because they're parts of the state where and we do an annual report um like where they're coming from and they're parts of the state that are dark to us and we know that's not because nothing's happening you know we just know because people live there so we know it's happening as the timekeeper in a wonderful public speech for our issue i gotta tell you time's up but um i don't think there's any other question or comment from the audience i have one quick question if you don't mind councillor Jang here can i ask councillor Jang yes um yes thank you for the presentation it says it's been very informative and as you know the state of Vermont just appointed three people to be the truth and reconciliation commissioners you probably know right um and they are charged in looking into discriminations um in terms of disability in terms of race and Abenakis and i was just wondering if the creation of that commission might bring more work to your agency or more discrimination processes will be coming to you because people have been discriminated by um the laws or by your decisions around you know around the legal matters do you do you see that potential or or no i do i'm hopeful that it will one of the members of the commission i think the chair of the commission is also the president of the Rutland NAACP who talks to us all the time and and presents you know problems or reports to us directly because some members of the communities that they represent don't feel comfortable talking to their police department um so we we want what we're trying to do is develop a kind of a no wrong door approach to this which is that all our different partners doesn't you have to know our number no but if you talk to the NAACP it's going to get to us if you we hope you know if it gets to different stakeholder groups it's going to get to us and then we're going to send it to the try to send it to the right people and sometimes like with rachel they're the right people to work on it sometimes it's us or it's the fbi or maybe it's all of us doing our part so we hope we hope they do not not because we want more incidents but because we know we're missing things and we want to have as many sources of information as possible and i think i'm hopeful for this commission that it will it will foster an environment where more brahmanters will be willing to come forward and share their stories even if it's anonymous it'll let us know what's going on um because it's hard for all victims and all survivors to talk about their experience but we find when there's a bias element it's even it's even greater uh and and their willingness to talk to us also might be affected by their past experience with us in government and that includes us um you know i mentioned people's reluctance um in dealing with law enforcement but i'm a lawyer you know and and all the all the awful laws that we had in our country you know historically lawyers wrote those so we're you know we have that history too we acknowledge that and so people might have views about the system that includes us and so sometimes we're not the right people to talk to so i'm i'm really hopeful and i'm very encouraged that i think friday is the first time that the committee is appearing before the legislature to introduce themselves and talk about their mandate and and i think it's it's it's it's very hopeful i'm glad that you you welcome that commission and uh for people who don't know we have a representative uh in our neighborhood patrice snudden will be representing people with disabilities in that commission thank you for being here so thank you yeah literally thank you okay we appreciate you being here coming to other mpa's and other community meetings around the state um yeah i thought this happened sure is this this helpful um i'll leave some business i bought thank you i did bring some business cards i just had i just grabbed a handful on my way out the door so i'll just leave them here and people yeah leave them on the table okay all right thank you thank you thank you thank you we'll move on to our next topic um this is about public safety and oversight a new north end perspective as you see on the agenda um our city counselors are considering a new plan for police oversight as a result um i think it was seven before our city um our town meeting um that we had in our election and our questions this was question seven and the charter change was um shot down but this is an opportunity for us to engage with our city counselors um about public safety what it means to ward four and seven residents and the challenges that follow um that they need so they had asked um if we could have this be on the agenda and we agreed that it would be a great thing as they're working on this at the city council so i don't know you and mark when i come up to them sir i think you're talking to julia um well i'll start with just a little background at least from my perspective um we've really been talking about this since 2020 and there's been a lot of conversation a lot of work done by a lot of people and i might not have my dates all um in my head um but there were there's been sort of i for lack of a better word some competing proposals there were there was a proposal that was prepared um by a committee of the city council um that was presented to the city council i believe in 2021 um it looked very similar to the content of ballot item seven that was looked at just now in town meeting day that particular proposal um ended up um getting vetoed by the mayor and did not go forward subsequent to that there began additional work on okay let's step back a minute and look at what we've got we've got the police commission we've got um certain things in state law that are could be restrictive how can we do this by ordinance and and mark might have the dates better than i do we passed a resolution i think unanimously that said we're going to go forward and look at what can we do for oversight um and what do we need to propose looking primarily at ordinance looking um probably at some restructuring of the police commission and um probably we'll need to involve a more modest charter change because there are some restrictions in state law that make additional oversight difficult that work proceeded down a path uh and the public safety committee was working on it um at the time um city attorney dan richerson drafted a bunch of materials and there was conversations about it uh attorney richerson ended up leaving the city and on a kind of parallel track the citizen group that proposed um ballot item seven resurrected itself and made a proposal for a charter change that was on our ballot that did not pass that now brings us to march of 23 um at this point in time myself clearly and the previous counselors as well as the new counselors are committed to to try and to resurrect the conversation of an oversight process um that will primarily be involving ordinance um we'll be looking at relationships with the um the police commission and we've just starting that work right now um we've agreed to put together a joint committee of counselors from the charter change committee and the ordinance committee to start tackling that and it's our goal to try to get a draft of something um that we can get consensus on hopefully by the end of june so that's kind of where we're at procedurally um there's there's a lot in that uh i was not involved in on that i was i've been on the charter change committee but was not on the charter change committee at the time those items were referred and i wasn't i'm now on the ordinance committee and i was not on the ordinance committee that um looked at all that detail but that's kind of where we're at now and i think what i want to do and i think councillor barlow and councillor jeng is just get more input on what kind of um process um would you like to see what should we focus on around police and public safety oversight and that this from my point of view is really just i'm here to take general feedback and also sort of stepping aside and stepping back very early in this process we did a survey i mean we have a 16 page memo from the previous city attorney on all the different models that are out there for police oversight ranging from what was proposed to um a whole variety so there's there's a lot to look at that uh and i think what we're interested in is what would feel right to folks what what do you feel is missing what what is it we need where the gaps from your point of view um so i'm i'm here just to really kind of get that feedback thanks you i think you pretty much covered it but um you're meeting next week correct is a yes the first meeting next next week so that's coming right up yeah the joint committee yes um so fire away well start with you're someone on knowing i'll just start okay um um i have a observation and i have a question the question is now that the joint committee has been established um what do you think will be the members take away from the town meeting's whole decision like what is the role of the fact that the proposal that was on the ballot was defeated that was my question and my observation was really um and i'm so not an effort on law enforcement it just seems just nationally generically speaking we in the conversation we never hear about the union negotiations you know maybe on the town council you're privy to know but it seems that this big blue wall is police unions and i don't hear a conversation and i and i wonder if it's i get the sense that it's opaque and the client closed doors anyway that would be my my thought it's like what's the status of the of the microphone wherever it's they can't hear you i think this is right on top of what you're saying the my question is what's the status of the contract we have with the police um and because um i just think that as employers we have some right to the quality of the service we get from city employees and when it's police and i'm going to use the bellivance case again as an illustration sometimes an employee it just needs to be fired and we need to have have the power in our contract with these employees that when they mess up that badly on the job that we should we should just be able to fire them and i'm just wondering if that if the contract lets us do that contract is many pages many many pages um and it has been negotiated we've just renegotiated uh i believe it's a three-year contract i can't remember um within it are issues around discipline and all of that kind of thing um and that needs to be looked at i think that is not something we're going to be tackling right away i think city ordinance and state law um can sometimes supersede that so we're gonna we're gonna look at all of that i think it's the the process itself that we need to look at and the defining factors around how does this get adequately adjudicated adequately process um so and it does touch on human resources and you know with any employee there's due process there's appeal rights um that we have to go through it doesn't matter what department the the employee is you can't basically just fire somebody but we need to look at how that can be done and who in who oversees that and that's the whole point of police oversight is is it just the chief is it just the police commission is it some combination of them are the third party people involved for instance um one of the models that might suit burlington uh is the addition of a monitor which is usually an independent um person often a person not a body but a person that can investigate um i think school systems when they have um reports of sexual abuse or bullying in schools often use a model like that to take it outside of the employees but that's the kind of thing that i think we've got to figure out what which works for a size of 45 000 person city with a 75 person agency you know what what works for us and there are some stumbling blocks like for instance um and all along we proposed that um that it not just end with the chief but what does that next step look like what's the appeal process i think rigid to part of your question um and this is my opinion and my only my observation was the proposal that went on the ballot was very complicated and it was presented as a charter change and to be honest one of my reasons for not supporting it is it had way too much administration in detail which really should be left to ordinance so that you can have the flexibility changing charter is um legislation that cannot be changed and in my opinion is usually bigger picture i mean if the proposal had said let's come up with a new process for reviewing um police oversight with you know some more sentences i think that would be fine it was very detailed i don't think it involved um anybody from law enforcement and so i think that was a huge gap in the process whether it would be our own employees or even folks from the outside were not involved in those discussions i i guess because julio was just here too i'm thinking a lot about bias and i think the the thing that i worry about with having law enforcement at least any active involved in the oversight is isn't there an inherent bias then um and i i think i don't know if this is maybe a conversation you can have with the agio about how to assess bias in the in the police department and how we can kind of preempt the need to fire people by making sure that we're we're checking that bias i would love to see type of oversight that teaches and really like includes bias as part of the oversight so like how do we how do we see if they are reporting crimes or all these things maybe that could be part of it maybe it can be um their own personal learning journeys as well to like figure out where their biases are and then even when you are determining who is going to be overseeing all these things if if we can kind of consider i think a lot of people i did hear a lot of pushback about not having police law enforcement involved as as oversight but i also feel like we also don't want to swing too far that way where where they kind of have another vote there um so i i just think whatever you all decide do maybe push some bias like work within that there are a lot of professional oversight boards that have members of the profession as part of the oversight because they are content matter experts as well and they understand um the entity and the role of people that are being overseen so i i personally feel it's important to have people from law enforcement who understand um i guess i just meant maybe someone who previously was instead of someone who actively is and maybe that would be a different way of addressing that without like active i don't know i don't know enough but that's kind of my thought hi could i hi this is me love grant um could i make a a comment please are there any other comments from people in law enforcement seven okay i guess i just wanted to say that it sounds like you're kind of asking us what we want the process to be for oversight and i for myself i'm much more interested in the outcomes um i think we give police a lot of power right we give them the power to take property arrest someone which can make them lose their job and do they can do direct violence to somebody and so the the outcome that i'd like to see is a reduction in abuse or misuse of that power um so instead of focusing on what type of oversight we'd like i guess a question to you is you've seen all these examples from around the country have any of those examples actually resulted in a reduce of in a reduction of the abuse of power because that's the one that i would like to go with i'm not sure that i can answer that in entirety and i think that's part of the work we need to do because i would agree with you that it is outcomes um and it's quite varied i mean a model for a city of a half a million dollar half a million people um might be very different from a city of 45 000 so we need to look at that uh and we need to figure out sort of the the scale and you know how many complaints a year do we get now i going back to i think one of your conversations i mean i think we need to look at probably restructuring part of you know what are the qualifications for um being on the police commission because we do have a civilian oversight body i mean it it exists whether it needs support through ordinance or the relationship to the chief i think is what we've got to yet determine but we do have a civilian oversight body and in my opinion i think we need to figure out how to enhance that and i agree with livias point there's a whole lot packed into what we need to continue to do with training in the in the department so that won't go away or can't go away that's really got to be front and center that's everyday work that's simply got to continue to happen um i don't think an oversight body in any means um takes away from that i mean it's not got to be the day-to-day work yes uh so i'm peter clevelle i know most of you not all of you but i served as mayor for a bit seven terms leave an office in 2006 so i offer a historical perspective but also a perspective as a current resident of the city and a resident of ward four uh burlington like so many cities across this country has found itself amidst a public safety crisis over the past three years and i think it's generally recognized that police reform not only police reform but reform of the criminal justice sector is a way out of this crisis and we need to find a new way of uh of policing which we need to reinvent policing and i think this issue of of oversights civilian oversight is a very important piece of it but i come at this from the perspective that the idea of creating an independent city department charged with police oversight it's not the right foot for burlington i also was really troubled by the fact that those serving on the committee being charged with police oversight were prohibited from having any expertise in the field and i do think that we have an opportunity in burlington to utilize the current citizens commission the police commission and entrust them with some authority and responsibility for police oversight so in my mind that would be the preferred model is to entrust the police commission without authority not to but also not remove the chief of police from the loop of having responsibility and authority and accountability for police discipline which the proposition that we voted on in march did i think the police chief needs to be in the loop but it can't be the end of the process in terms of police discipline and the idea of having checks and balances there where uh there are citizens that are monitoring the police actions but also can serve as a as a body to hear citizen complaints relative to police conduct that might go in fact go around the police chief it is also a good idea so i think this is a very important issue facing the city i think it's we're at a critical juncture now where there's a recognition that we need to reform not only policing but specifically the role of civilians in terms of oversight of the police department but i think we ought to come forth with a burlington solution that looks at a long-standing institution the police commission and entrust them with authority accountability and responsibility thank you do you want to ask to speak i'd like to hear what she has to say please well i think annie is a resident so residents get there okay i'd still like to hear mula's point annie you have your hand up yeah thanks and i thanks for pointing that out too Martha um when i think about um public safety and accountability i think that any uh attempt on public safety has to start from an awareness of power dynamics uh and power dynamics in a community because not everybody's feeling of safety is going to be the same it's going to depend on how much power they have um and so based on that i also think public safety means um people having humility and being humble enough to consider that what feels safe to them and what feels like adequate oversight to them might not match somebody else's experience of those things somebody might think that one level of accountability goes way too far and someone else might say no that's actually that feels just right i think that that is appropriate and so um keeping in mind that we're all going to have different experiences but we're all part of this same public and we're all part of the same community so truly finding public safety means meeting meeting um the folks who who maybe need the most meeting them where they're at who might need the most amount of reassurance and accountability that i think that um that's what's needed to really achieve true public safety that includes everybody and um i think what that means then is looking at whether the community members with the least amount of power feel safe city counselors are charged with coming up with now a new proposal and a new idea for how to move this forward and i would respectfully point out that people on city council have a large amount of power especially in comparison to average members of the community so i would i'd like to just express my hope that um Sarah and mark you'll stay humble and stay open to the idea that what feels like adequate oversight to you might be very different from what feels adequate to someone else and just keep in mind that your your position is going to inform that um i also think that true public safety has to involve accountability and independence because as folks were saying earlier uh by this is is a real thing so for there to be true accountability things have to be really transparent and have to be fully independent and the challenge with um charging the police commission right now with this is that they're not independent and they don't have any authority and they don't have the ability to be transparent with the rest of the community so um i think that for that to work as a solution that have to be some real changes to the structure of that body and their authority um and the last thing i'll say is that um somebody earlier raised the question of why why we can't just fire a bad cop and um one of the counselors i think responded that um we don't have that authority uh in city council and it's because of the state legislature and i might have misunderstood that but um i do know and i am aware that city counselors can fire members of the police department excuse me city counselors can fire members of the fire department and so whatever's in the fire department's contract that allows that it seems reasonable that we could create that same agreement in the contract that police officers hold both of those departments are charged with um ensuring that the community stays safe thanks thanks i mean i feel like Amy any Larson did mention everything that i wanted to say but just to thank really uh former mayor Peter Clavel about his great points um about the importance and it's it's needed it's definitely needed but the question right now is no longer about the past proposal but as we move forward what is what what really fits for the city and from my perspective i think a charter change will be even more valuable and more powerful because it will have the input of every single resident voters in the city right if you go back a little bit in 2020 December 2020 there was actually a proposal and you all know what the city council did did was it it didn't go anywhere we move a little bit further the police commission itself brought a resolution seeking to be empowered with more power in order to exert police oversight it did not go anywhere so it seemed as if the sense of urgency people are forgetting it if you are very comfortable in your skin in your neighborhood in your power there are people in this community that are struggling and they want oversight where they have the voice we currently have two different boards and commission in the city to look into it where is the input from the community how will it look like right so basically we'll create an ordinance without the input of those being policed and from my perspective that's the most fundamental aspect that we need to ensure whatever we're cooking when it's done how do we make sure that people openly have their voices heard and respected right and also all of these joint meetings how do we make sure right that members of this community are engaged into these discussions it's not only you know two minutes public oversight two minute public forum but it should be more than that right and I think work is required and anyone with ideas with expertise I think the city is welcome to to to listen to those and how do we bring about the best oversight for the city thank you well I'm really happy we could put together this forum tonight and I'm really glad to see so many people here when I think about oversight I think a huge part that's lacking in the community is trust trust with the police force and I think you know a huge contributor to that is really the lack of transparency around discipline in the discipline process for those of you who don't know the chief is responsible for the discipline and the information is very cloistered the police commission does get to review it but they can't like talk about it if so if you know a commissioner feels like you know something wasn't adequate well we'll never know that and so how the community is finding out about discipline that may be insufficient is the most extreme explosive cases where it either goes to court or there's a 32-day occupation of a public park or there's an article in a newspaper we're only hearing about these most explosive discipline issues and you know I would want like so you know if you were to ask me like do you trust the police department I feel like I just I don't have the information because I'm only seeing like the worst case scenario with the discipline and you know I think that the discipline could be more transparent I think it could only be helpful in building trust because you know you know chief mirad may be handling 99% of the discipline in a way that feels like really good and equitable to all berlin tonians but I mean there's there's there's no way to know that so for me like I don't even I don't even feel like I have the information to make an informed decision on whether I can trust the discipline process so for me I think a huge huge huge part of building trust with the community is for the there be ways for the community to be able to know and assess how the discipline is being handled and I am sure that there are creative ways that can be worked out with the police union in a way that also feels equitable to them like maybe it's having the the data disaggregated in a way that doesn't violate their employment confidentiality with discipline I'm sure there's a way that could be equitable for all involved but still be informative we have one on the Adam are you from wards four or seven yeah I'm from ward four great what's your question um so uh so yeah I think um as a you know I guess a perspective to kind of share as a social worker who you know I work you know downtown with folks living with substance use um in their lives often homelessness is touching their lives and also the intersectionality of um mental you know mental health mental and wellness and I think something that comes in my mind is a lot of the folks who I I sit with and share space with have had lots of um encounters with police and and that is often um encounters that leave them with a feeling of distrust and and um you know very you know just experiences that just seemed that could have been you know avoidable had there had there been different um you know a different approach so I think something I think of is just kind of like how to you know one how do we find ways to have a system that holds people accountable but also not losing sight of like how um can this be something that helps proactively um raise awareness and and and bring um bring people together to like not have to respond to something that happens but actually like start thinking about measures to get ahead of um moments that don't need to happen and I think that isn't necessarily what like what we're talking about here but I think that's something that needs to be held in any conversation of like people are really are suffering and and often the impacts and effects of of these things all um coming together substance use mental health and whole you know lack of uh housing um it's like a lack of hope and that can be a scary place for anyone to be in and I think um the those voices need to be heard and I think when we're thinking about how we design something the voices of those who often are having the most impact or the most touch points with police I'm not certain or confident their um voices are being heard they're being heard in a way that's actually changes coming from that and I and I think that's something that I hope moving forward that we can find ways to use those who have relationships with folks in the community to bring forward their voices because I think there's lots of knowledge to gain and um and I will say too there's folks who've had very you know wonderful experiences with the police so it's not just things that are negative there's also um lots to learn from the the touch points that have been very positive too um and I I think of those things when we're talking today and um and not losing sight of like the the voices that are in this room today and maybe have never been in the room to kind of share how they would like to see a different um police department uh kind of system as well as how to hold those accountable who who have been hurt um um I just want to point out that I feel like has been touched on a little bit but I don't think necessarily explicitly said is that um something that I think you sort of mentioned was like well we need to look at what's been reported for people maybe reporting bad incidents with the police but the most marginalized communities that have historically and currently had those bad run-ins with the police for whatever reason so people of color queer people people who um are low income or don't have or are homeless or have addictions like all of those marginalized communities don't have power and they feel hopeless and they don't think that reporting it is at their the way they view it is that the best outcome of reporting something is nothing happens but if they report it and people know who their names are and the police know who their names are they fear retaliation and that's I think that going forward in looking at oversight it can't just be looking at what's been reported there needs to be an active movement and active whatever by the city council to find out what's not being reported and why because that's just as important if not more important because those are the people who are disproportionately being affected by those negative interactions with the police and I know for myself I haven't specifically had any negative interactions with any particular person in the police department but I've done things like report um the like transphobic sickering to the police department as graffiti and especially when I was first trying to figure out who to reach about that no one responded and I'm not going to report that necessarily to anyone as a negative interaction with the police even though it is which makes me feel like they don't even if they do care maybe the person who got that report did care but there's nothing they could do about it for XYZ reason it makes me feel like they don't care so I'm not going to report that particularly to any sort of committee that is specifically run by members of the police department because that makes me feel like they don't care and if it's a situation where it's like maybe majority community members with some police experts that makes me feel better because more people on that committee are going to identify with me personally rather than a people who are a part of that community that we are trying to oversee who are likely in my opinion in what I've seen are probably just going to default to agreeing with the police and I know even if that's not true that's not necessarily true that's how a lot of people perceive it so it can't just be an oversight that is run by and like overly biased in the aspect of the police department because no one's going to trust that I want to see just a small thing off of that that I thought about whenever I was talking is just that yeah I would love further to be an anonymous compliments and complaints that we could submit something I don't even know because I unfortunately had a really horrible experience with the police a few years ago when my sister was suffering a mental health crisis and it was a really horrible experience and I would have really appreciated if I knew kind of how I could do something about that because I think some people don't feel comfortable doing that but I didn't even know how to kind of explain that experience or who to go to so a transparent way to provide feedback to a group of people who are not in the police department so that I know that they won't tell they won't it's a small department so they would know maybe who that person was and then have their own opinions and biases about that person I would just like a a transparent open way to and also just say I had a really good interaction with this person and pass that along too because I think we're also like I've also had good experiences and I would love to give those feedback give that feedback to a body that is overseeing that but is not in the police department I'm talking about police oversight we have to figure out where we are right now has anybody read the April chief's report we have 64 people on the police department totally of that six of them are inactive now that leaves 58 as you look at the chart that they have there are only 26 police officers on a 24 hour basis in our city right now what we need is oversight of hiring getting people in line and get us back up to 96 people then I think we should go out and try to look for an oversight and that oversight talking about Peter Clavel here he's absolutely right we don't need and people voted down the bureaucracy of number seven on the ballot so we don't want to go there we want to go and make our police commission that strong oversight and on top of that you have the city council and on top of that you have the mayor so you have a chain of checks and balances already in place that have been in place for hundreds of years in the city and I don't think you have to go reaching out for some obscure thing that people just voted down on number seven and I'll just sort of dovetail on what Cliff said I'm going back over the suggested questions about public safety that we put out in the agenda tonight and one of them is I feel safe when and I don't feel safe when I hear that there are only 64 police officers that work for the city of Burlington and six of them are not active I feel safe when I know there's morale within the police department when there's coverage for the community there has to be some level of peace between the police department and the community and I don't feel that the city is on a good track when I go downtown I don't always feel comfortable anymore going to dinner on church street the other night yeah it wasn't the same I didn't feel unsafe but I found myself really being aware of my surroundings looking over my shoulder and it's kind of a weird unsettled feeling in my little city of Burlington so my hope would be that the community allows the police department to get back on track and that there is something that happens whatever the heck it's called that lends communication lends trust and rebuilds because I do fear that the city is going in the wrong direction as a whole because of a lot of these events so just my two cents his authority is not what it should be as an interim it should be so that I think should be corrected we also got an email from Nancy saying that she doesn't but she's concerned about the safety of visitors the city beaches during warm especially weekends is there any police presence at the beaches especially during evening hours there is a times fire risk if people build open fires there's use of the houses etc that was fun to be back we had three no and my uh to find the comment to yours I'm in between my thoughts yes and yes and I wonder we've created we have contributed as a community to the problem when we defunded the police and I myself feel that the Burlington police decision I think it's correct that they're just not going to enforce traffic violations or minor traffic violation really my team New York of the 1970s I think it was when they decided I can't remember who the mayor was then they're going to crack down on time and they're going to start investigating crack window people you know that was kind of minor crime but the idea was they had to regain custody even with minor crimes because there was a problem with that press and the reason so like I don't have an answer but my question is for the commission why are your crimes the one you described which I think are crime why were they not taken up because we defunded the police and or there is a bias in the police department but we have to know the answer to that you know both of them are measurable factors and we have to restore the trust in our community to walk down Church Street I completely agree but we're just entering this era it's nationwide of this things are bad things are unsafe things are criminal things are evil and we need a police force to stop it you know control they play such a critical role in our fight in our community even little town of Burlington 45,000 residents it's that trust factor and on both sides and we've lost it for lots of reasons we've lost it and and and a recreation or realignment of the commission I think would go along would go a long way I was just going to say the most patient lady in the room is Milo and maybe we could just give her two minutes and then come back is that fair guess we saw 15 minutes actually a pertinent question that I will make a follow-up on okay so I'm going to ask you for clarifying help after I give this little plug so Olivia had talked about you know it would be good if there's a place where we could make anonymous concerns and also accommodations and Milo can probably provide better information there is a spot for that I'm not sure if it's on the website of the police department or the police commission but the police commission has a process where you can make a complaint to them rather than directly to the police department I'm not sure of all the specifics with that but there is also a place where you can make commendations to the police department and those are read at the monthly police commission meetings last night I went to a police commission meeting and they read a positive comment from a community member who had witnessed an interaction and they complimented the officer's handling of a dangerous situation peaceably so yeah I encourage people who who do want to give those compliments I'm sure there are people that would love to hear those hi could I jump in yes um just a quick reminder I am now on the city council I am serving on the public safety committee as some of you know I've previously served as a police commissioner and I served on the special committee to review policing policies so I've been knee deep in public safety issues going on for four years now I've been taking a lot of notes so thank you Lee for what you said absolutely correct people can report commendations directly to the police department or report them to any one of the police commissioners the email addresses are located on the city's website and this can also include commendations we recently had a combination of during my last meeting for CSO which was great to see because people in the community are welcoming those positions and those positions are able to handle a number of incidents that do not require a sworn officer with regards to anonymous complaints if someone doesn't want to use the online portal um they can talk directly to a police commissioner and they can request an anonymous executive session with the police commission that is something that has happened in the past when people wanted to give additional information about what what their complaint was and and and what they wanted to report um sometimes complaints are too anonymous people don't want to give enough don't want to give information they don't even want anybody to know what they have so they'll submit something on the portal but there's no contact information and sometimes we can't follow up on certain complaints if we can't actually talk to a person in the police department can't follow up with them if they can't actually talk to the person to verify certain details but some people do that because they are afraid that they would be targeted that is a real um fear I wanted to answer some other questions that I've heard with regards to safety on the beaches um there are park rangers now and one of the issues of the park rangers are going to be working on is to be educating people on how to use the space and this would be people that include burlington residents um tourists because there has been issues in the past with the number of bonfires uh that were uh being set so park rangers will be on the beaches uh I think there's only two of them right now but I know there's some seasonal people I'd have to check into that the park rangers unfortunately have to deal with a lot of issues around um cleaning up spaces where people are using as we all know we are in the midst of a horrendous drug crisis that is only getting worse um so there is sometimes the park rangers have to deal with uh handling these spaces moving people who are trying to camp in the parks um you know you get complaints in one park it's it's kind of a dark game of whack-a-mole move someone to another location move them again move them again it depends on the number of complaints that people are are doing but they're trying very hard to limit encampments but it's going to get worse after um some of the funds for housing start to disappear in June uh going back to someone who had a question about the contract if you want to email me at ME grant at burlingtonvt.gov I'd be happy to send you a copy of the contract um there were items from the cna review of the department that were related to the contract these items were submitted to the negotiator um I found it personally disappointing that a lot of these items I wish they could have done better for example the department does not save um disciplinary records for very long it's way below what is considered best practice and it it really wasn't increased much and there were a number of items um too numerous in detail to go into now but anyone who wants to look at the contract it is available to look at um trust trust is really important trust is in the first pillar of um the 21st century policing that is something that is thrown around a lot um but we don't follow those pillars in burlington and that's something we need to be honest about and that we need to look at uh 37 of the population voted for ballot item seven yes that percentage was not enough to pass it but it's not an insignificant number um this or this group has thousands and thousands of emails this group is meeting they are monitoring what the city council is going to do will the city council go back and really look at the powers of the police commission and make a good faith uh gesture for uh creating accountability and oversight if not this organization will go back and come back with something else because we feel the need and I do count myself with them because I have been deeply concerned and this is based on what I've seen we are not police the same in the city which is why we had protests too which is why we have a certain divide which is why some people feel safe and other people don't um we are not police the same equity is an issue um and equity not only just around race but around economics um many levels so I encourage everyone to look into the 21st century policing and the pillars everyone the city should familiarize yourself with them and say what is our department doing to meet these pillars because we need them to really take a look at that and they have a new person who will be helping with um providing outreach and public information uh she's fairly new she's training right now I look for it I think that was a really important position to add I fully supported that position um I gave input into the drop description uh because we need to to make inroads um and I think I'll look at there might have been another question that I might have missed that someone oh hiring I will say about hiring quickly I did bring up uh several times issues around the fact that we had uh the commission had supported the city council voted for the increase in the pay and the bonuses and then we weren't advertising them adequately and I brought this to the attention of the mayor um I ultimately brought it attention to city council president paul who had it fixed but some of that information if you're someone especially from out of state and you're considering a lateral transfer to our city you're not getting the full information about what's available to you and that might prevent you from uh putting in an application so I think we have to make sure that we're dotting all the eyes and crossing the teams it was ridiculous to have gone through the process to do this increased in funds so that we the department can build back and then not advertise what we were offering even on the city's own website where you go to put an application the uh salary was wrong it was pretty astounding thank you very much um M.E. Grant at berlingtonbt.gov be happy to answer any other questions people have five more minutes is there any other topics you all would like I mean we're really here to get feedback and there's a there's a lot of it everything you need or it's an ongoing process I mean and I think that's really the the point of it there has been a lot of work done so I just want to like clarify and I think somebody mentioned the work that had started with the police commission so we've got a document we've got a lot of feedback so it hasn't been like coming out of nowhere um but the whole point of tonight and other meetings will be to to continue to get it four minutes yours oh I just like to add quickly though that my hope is that this process will involve all all stakeholder groups who have interest in this topic and we'll have plenty of opportunity at the joint um committee level at the city council level um and hopefully there'll be some other you know public forum opportunities to go along with this along the way as as the process unfolds to get to continue to collect input and try to shape something that does fit Burlington like uh and just so I don't want to kind of just quickly clarify we're talking about a um a process in the next few months to clarify and establish a better process particularly around reporting and transparency of police discipline that doesn't stop all the work we've got to do on improving policing we we have a public safety committee they're going to look at trends they're going to look at outreach I mean and we have the police commission who needs to be independent and if they're not independent enough that's what we're going to try to figure out in the ordinance so that they can be independent um but it's not like we're done and done um this is just the beginning but can you give them a team I don't see fire cops we don't have any cops to fire um so just two things really quick um one is um I totally hear and to some extent agree that I don't feel like there's necessarily enough staff on the police to handle everything that's being thrown at them but at the same time I don't think that it's a situation where we have to where we can wait on things like an ordinance like this to hire up to that I think those things need to be in tandem to show people to show faith to the community but also to tell potential hires in the police department this is what we're looking for they can't it can't be one and then the other they can be at the same time but it can't be we have to staff up before we figure this out we need to figure it out in my opinion first and then the other thing is um I think it's really important to make sure whether these conversations continue to happen like in this sort of forum or any other forum it needs to be making sure we're reaching out to everyone not just the people who maybe have the time to they don't have kids or they can leave their kids at home or maybe people have to work at night or whatever to make ends meet we need to make sure we're reaching every single person because the people who are the most marginalized and the people who view the police as untrustworthy are the people who are more likely to be abused by the power the police have so space needs to be actively made for those people to be in part of the conversation as well thanks everybody