 I think we can do this really quickly tonight. So I know, because I know I've already made the vote for the German leaders. No. Well, I think we're going to be good. Welcome. Oh, I'm supposed to look at the camera. Meaning of the racial disparities in the criminal and juvenile justice system advisory panel. We should do the introductions. Would you like to start? Of course. My name's Pepper, Department of State's attorneys and chairs. Kent Schatz, Department for Children and Families. Rebecca Turner, Defender General's Office. Jessica Brown, Chittenden County Public Defender Office. David Schair, Attorney General's Office. Brian Greer, Chief Superior, Kent Schatz, General's Office. Chief Don Stevens, Don Liggin, and Evan Icky-Trodden. Monica Wieber, Department of Corrections. Gary Scott, the State Police. Aton, that's Redmond Longo, Chair. The announcements are pretty simple. Sheila can't make it tonight. And really, it's begging, as I think you all saw, that we not have meetings on the fourth Tuesday of the month anymore. I really didn't want to have this happen. As you all know, it was that nasty substance known as sleep. And Rick Gauthier can't make it. And Ingrid Jonas can't make it. Those are the people who I've heard from. I haven't heard from anybody else, so we're here. Any other announcements? Well, you gave us a bunch. That was great. Thank you. Yeah, you're welcome. Just a lot of things going on. Yeah. Good things. Very good things. Anything else that anybody has. I am. That was all I had. Let's move on to the minutes. I sent them out to you. 26 February seems like, I don't know, there were Neanderthals at that point in time running about. I barely can remember that one. But 12 March, I still have in my head. So why don't we start with 26 February? Does anyone have any addenda or changes or anything of that nature for those minutes? For the 26th of February? OK, second? Seconded. All in favor? I all opposed? All abstentions? They can't, as we have at full. God, I can't talk tonight. They're fine. Thank you. March 12, those were the ones that Pepper did for us, which I'm going to be relying heavily upon when I start to come up with something that we can all tear apart. Thank you. You're welcome. Any, again, changes, addenda, comments? Someone like to move that we? Great, someone second. Once again, Jerry seconds. All in favor of approving this agenda, or minutes, minutes? All right. All opposed? All abstaining? I have to abstain if I wasn't here. That wasn't there. You weren't there? Sure. That's fine. Anyway, they are as submitted. Thank you, approved. Moving right along, brief discussion. We did this last time of bills that were sort of on our purview. You'll remember last time we talked about, oh, God, I can't remember the numbers, but you remember, we were talking about, I don't know what's in here, someplace, H 381, an act relating to racial impact statements. And we talked about that last time. So there are actually two here. I don't have the second one on the agenda. But the first one is H 460, which you have a copy of right now, an act relating to sealing and expungement of criminal history records. Again, this is something that, as you all know, we've been talking about as something that we would want to put in recommendations in the report. So I thought we should talk about it. I am grateful to Pepper, who brought it to my attention. And then also, because he's going to talk about it. So take it over. Sure. So this bill relates to the sponging of criminal records, H 460. It's the product of work over the summer with my office, the attorney general's office, the court administrator's office, and the defender general's office. And the original charge from the legislature was to think about adding to the list of crimes that can be expunged, felony drug possession crimes. And so if you'll see on currently just everyone's clear, felonies, except for four of them, are not expungement eligible. So adding felony drug possession crimes is a somewhat significant step forward for the legislature. But if you look on page two and three, you'll see all the drug possession crimes that have been added to expungement eligibility. Just so everyone's aware, the other criteria, I mean, to be expungement eligible, you have to have a qualifying crime. You have to wait five years from the completion of your sentence. You have to have paid all restitution and court fees and all the rest. And you have to have no intervening crimes in between the time of your completed sentence and during that five year waiting period. So this adds drug possession crimes. It adds a number of crimes that are generally what we determine to be associated with drug substance use disorder. For instance, conspiracy to receive stolen property, false personation, false pretenses, receiving stolen property. I know that the House added kind of uttering forged instruments, which is kind of like writing bad checks or taking someone else's check and signing for it and taking it. The Senate has also now added DUI 1 to ceiling eligibility. And I mean, that's basically what this does. There's some technical changes as to what the court actually, what requirements are placed upon the court when someone is granted an expungement. There's some changes to the effect of the ceiling. And it also eliminates fees if you're filing an expungement petition. Normally, there's a $90 fee associated with filing a petition for expungement. The courts are allowed to waive that fee, but this just eliminates it altogether, which is probably the right thing to do from a policy standpoint. Some days 90 is a lot of money. And there's been some inconsistent treatment as to whether it's $90 per petition or per charge or you have charges in multiple counties. You pay the $90 once, or you have to pay it for each petition. So just kind of in a way to simplify and kind of provide more fairness, and the fee was just eliminated. OK. Then you want to add David? No, no, I think it's somewhere in there where we are now. This may be a matter of my own density, but did you? Is it in here what the requirements for expungement are? It's probably not in here. But if you look up 13 VSA 7603, that is the section of law which describes how you get an expungement or a ceiling. And it explains what steps are required before you get a petition. OK. All right, I will do that. Thank you. So that would tell you how you go to the courthouse or something, or whatever. Is it online? Well, no, it actually, what that does is sets up the criteria that makes you eligible for an expungement as far as getting one. I mean, I think people have probably heard about expungement clinics that our state's attorneys have been holding around the state where you need to run a background check. There's a fee associated with that. So at the expungement clinics, we've been waiving those background check fees. And we've been having our state's attorneys, if you're eligible for an expungement, help fill out the paperwork, and then try and waive the $90 fee also. There's kind of a way to do that. It's not spelled out explicitly how to do it. You have to be somewhat savvy with the criminal justice system to understand how to file that petition. So one thing that has always been talked about in the legislature is trying to figure out a way to automate that process. And automation is a bad term for that because there's always going to have to be people reviewing the application and doing the work of actually expunging the record. So we've been trying to shift the thinking to a petitionless system where the individual who has the criminal record doesn't have to actually fill out the petition. It's automatically generated on the part of the state's attorney, and then they review it, and then they can object. But that's kind of a conversation that's been happening with respect to what technology is required in order to do that. It reminds me of the complications of this that you're sort of getting at that people that you were just saying it requires a certain level of savvy. I was remembering, I think it was you, Rebecca, who brought up at the last meeting the issue of having know your rights trainings and such. And that seems like yet more ammunition for putting that in our recommendations that we might need to put that forward to the legislature and the report is that that kind of thing has to happen, particularly with something that's this labyrinth. If you look at what we call, just informally, the uptake rate of expungement, you look at the known universe of convictions that are expungement eligible, and then you look at how many people are actually applying for expungements, it's less than 1%. So that kind of just highlights the idea that not a lot of people know about expungement, and maybe even if you know about it, you think, well, do I apply? Are we going to go through that? Or maybe it's the $90 fee, or there's lots of hurdles in the right. So maybe that would be more. Anyway, I just want to put that out there, but just to make a tie back to our last meeting. Anything else that I would just add? We're in the process of rolling out a new case management system over the next two years. And as we do that, hopefully it will become easier for people to access that information and process those requests for expungement. But I would have to echo Pepper's comments. I don't think it'll ever really be automatic in the sense that it's up to the state's attorney to, there are different pieces that different courts have to do. Right now, for instance, there's one statute that speaks to petition lists, but it has a two-step process, and that is that the Department of Corrections has to tell us that the person has served their sentence. Whatever it is, we don't get that information, and I don't know that they can provide it to us. So we require someone to determine, first of all, whether this person has served their sentence, whether their restitution is a condition of expungement. And so there are different parts. Right. The conviction is one piece of it. There are other parts that somebody usually has to verify that they have been complied with. And it's not the court's obligation to do that. Who are the case managers? Literally social workers, LICSWs? Or what do you mean? Well, when you say case manager, I immediately go into social work. Case management system. Oh, I'm sorry, case management. It's an electronic filing system. Oh. In other words, going forward. Not a human at all. I mean. That's the idea. Right. So everything has to be filed electronically. Okay. Obviously, if you're self-representing, you can still file on paper. Right. But then to live on the internet, they will. Yes. I'm still old. I think there are humans involved. The only other piece that I had just a resource piece for us, or somebody we can look to, Vermont Legal Aid has been, in addition to the state's turnings, Vermont Legal Aid has been doing a huge amount of work on this and dedicated some serious resources to holding an expungement fund in the state. And, you know, it does not have to be a big thing, but somebody that we could point to or look to as an example. That would be great. People have provided a lot of know-your-rights type of materials. They've got a whole webpage that explains how to do expungements. And just in terms of the, I mean, they've probably driven the expungement rate up by some significant percentage of themselves. So, somebody we can point to. So we can point to the resource. Okay. You're taking minutes. Could you? I won't add that. I'm just kidding. That's exactly what you said. I have a question that if these, if we're looking at supporting this and there's a process for expungement, wouldn't it make sense that we would recommend also that for crimes of these natures, if they meet certain criterias that they would be looked to do, maybe court diversion or something, so they don't even become into the system, that there might be some, if they meet the certain, whatever it is, court diversion, and that it wouldn't, they would be, you know, they wouldn't even get a record. I don't know, I'll ask for the question. It's a great point. And maybe you want to speak about Tamarack a little bit. Sure. Yeah, no, it is a good point. It's been a huge subject of discussion and activity over the last couple of years. So a couple of points to make. One is that for expungement eligible misdemeanors right now, there is a presumption that those crimes should be put into diversion or those charges should be put into diversion unless a state's attorney objects and they have to provide a reason why they're objecting. The second piece is that for these drug fuel, I should say, substances used to sort of fuel defenses, there's a new program under the AGO umbrella that's called the Tamarack program. And it's kind of like diversion. It's sort of legally speaking in the diversion statute, but it's really more of a treatment type of program getting people connected with mental health resources, substance abuse resources. So there actually has been a huge push on that and we've seen very large increases in the numbers of people. It's still too early though to know yet about results and efficacy because it just got instituted in 2017, but it's a good point. So they're working on it. They're working on it. Yeah, a lot of activity. This bill will likely correct kind of historic crimes. Tamarack's been living around for two years. So I would say a lot of these drug possession crimes would most likely be going to a diversion style program at this point. And that goes in line with misdemeanor thefts too, right? They have some type of nexus to them. They steal an item, but it's led to... That's exactly right. So yeah, Tamarack might well be appropriate as opposed to regular diversion, original diversion for that type of activity too, when people know that it's really related to substance issue. That's something that came up last time, Jeff, when we were talking about sort of the theft of Nike sneakers. They take the totality of the circumstances when they bring them in and try to figure out where the best place to put that person to a knock in and then that's sort of a little more record. Your Honor, yeah, I can't remember where I parked my car. I know. Anything else, something I... This is totally sideways, but I would like to take advantage of the wisdoms at this table, just because in the last couple of days I've had a number of questions about two particular arrests. One for joints in a pocket that was considered open container, and one for joints that were somewhere in the car, but again, worn in a sealed container in the glove box. And those are two arrests in the past few days. And I've been asked, so I don't need an answer, but if people could think on that one, I mean, we're pulling them out one end of the pipe and we're putting them right in the other end as far as I can tell. Do you know what county they're in by, by chance? No, no, I know. Why are we being tested for our possession of marijuana? Yeah, I know. It's an open container in a pocket. One was Addison, the other one was somewhat up north. I'm not trying to point fingers that the officers made this extenuating circumstances, but the last two I got yesterday from people. Those should be traffic tickets. Okay. So it shouldn't be a arrest, so. Okay, all right, so it's a ticket. It's a ticket. It's a ticket. Okay. It's a civil violation. And that's for like, I'm assuming they just. Even an open container of alcohol would be. I'm assuming that's the law they're using. Yeah, it's traffic tickets. Okay, all right, thanks. But fundamentally, the violation is civil, arguably, but the constitutional protection still apply, right? Right, I should say that. Just funded like broadly speaking, just to give you some background. Whether or not in those individual cases, there's some suppression motions. Hopefully, if you need some referrals to some attorneys, we can talk about that. Well, we're over there for these four. To me and Reina Bell about the attorney pockets inside out, New York City, oh, you've got dope in this, and it's in the open. Therefore, you've now got a bigger crime, kind of thing, that New York leaks a year, so. It's a nice segue into, All right. Do you want, are we done with this? No, I'm sorry. This is what we should be going through. Go ahead, go ahead. Well, you're the part two of our last meeting. I was highlighting some of the comments from the minutes. Sheila's and Jeff Gray's and where we want to go. But hey, Tom, where do you see us guiding this? You mean right now? Yeah. I want to hear what you're saying. All right, I'm channeling. So, I'm looking and we all have copies of the minutes as we just approved. Data collection, data collection. You and March 12th. Yeah, March 12th. March 12th. Where I'm at, and I thought that this was something, and I was here participating by phone because I went to a water brewery. Oh, that's right. I thought I was not going to go to a water brewery. I was there, I was there in the phone presence. My sense of what we talked about, was that Sheila came in at the end saying, I hear everyone's suggestions, but the elephant in the room that we are not squarely addressing, is both sort of this pullback and recognition that our task here is to, a, first, acknowledge readily that the problem here is the whites of primacy inherent in the criminal justice system. Okay. B, how are these specific proposals, narrow, big, whatever, fitting within that? I think, Jeff, where you picked that up and recording your minutes saying, yes, you know, ultimately, there is so much discretion, unbridled discretion effectively as to who enters the criminal justice system, police and prosecutors being at the forefront of that. I wanted to just add the second part, which is, for me, I also see that as the problem that our criminal, I wish you on this, and I didn't get a chance to weigh in in support of her specifically, and to readily acknowledge that our criminal justice system is a reflection of our history, our history being slavery and white supremacy and it's inherent. And I think it continues today with the disparities of the people impacted by our racist through historical, historical absorption of our own particular history, that that manifests itself by racial disparities you see in the jails. We already have talked as a group, sort of hearing from Robin Joy and data, I know that there is the counter reports with Stephanie Synguena, we can go very specific there, but ultimately, I think we have come around to the fact that the legislature has recognized there's a problem for us to suggest specific solutions to that. I see the problem is twofold in the most broadest sense. Unbridled discretion by law enforcement and prosecutors for the game and where we have our implicit and explicit biases factoring in, we know from the studies that there's discriminatory effect of that, so that comes into play. Whether or not we can neutralize whether or not it's happening at the initial stop, or the extension of the stop or the search or who gets ultimately arrested or what kinds of charges, ultimately we know there's a disparity of who's enemy this is. And the second bigger problem, unbridled discretion problems, is that once folks enter the court and then go through it, through corrections, all of a sudden we apply a race-neutral set of standards, so we can't ever get back at looking at the highly discretionary, race-based implicit biases at the time of the stop. And I'm talking about our standards that we've adopted as basics in our funding law. Reasonable expectations of privacy, reasonable expectations of suspicion of crime of what is all the subjective criteria where we stripped racial bias. Now Zula we've talked about as a group and in there one of the most significant aspects of Zula, aside from the Vermont Supreme Court recognizing a constitutional tort on violations of Article 11 of the Vermont Constitution based on violations of your right to be not be subject to unreasonable circumcision by the government, which is motivated by racial animus. That is an interesting injection by our Vermont Supreme Court of a standard that used to be race-neutral, but recognizing allowing racial animus. You see the equation now, that's a civil side of remedies. Taking the two together, I just would suggest, because this is a huge problem that we can't, I mean I don't hope to try to solve racism in Vermont's criminal justice system overnight, but I do think that if we recognize the two big problems, my scene is two. Unbridled discretion that we should suggest to the legislature should be checked somehow and that is that we'll form the law enforcement and prosecutors form a discretion ideas to have what to charge, who to charge, how much to charge, and then ultimately what to ask for at the sentencing stage. And then at the court side, trying to make sure that we get standards that hold that accountability of that discretion that incorporates racial aspects, instead of stripping and pretending we're in sort of a colorblind arena, a certain arena in Vermont. With a little cleaning up, we could just write that and that would work. You gotta do it. Well, I'll tell you, I'm not, I'm not, you know. I'm not. I'm not. Has anyone read this? Yes. Oh, I haven't. I can't read it. Yeah. Right, it's chapter three. It's chapter three. Yeah. Right, it helps to articulate for me the problems that you've been seeing. Right. I just think that, I don't know. I don't know, I wish Sheila were here. She does too. And others. But it's not like a one person group and I just know that so much of her concerns is that I just, I wanna make sure that we're on sort of that level. I don't know. I hear feedback from you guys on that. Curious what you say. I'm glad to hear you, so everyone has read that. No, I'm not through with it. I'm not. Yeah, I'm not. Yeah. Right. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I feel that, and if we make a recommendation on what you're saying, I think the first thing that legislators or other people will say, what was the solution? I would say we would, I would think in caveat with that, you would advise that either the new racial equity panel who is responsible for helping the new executive director whenever that person is hired to help with those, looking into those, because they're supposed to look at the state processes and laws and everything anyway to make recommendations. Would that, with them in conjunction with the Human Rights Commission, or who's the proper people to look into this? Or is it a new panel with the pet player? They're gonna wanna know, okay, that's great, you recommended this, now what? Maybe that's not our job, but I would think that to be responsible if we're going to recommend something, we should also recommend a potential avenue to look at. I don't know if that's, if we should or not. I was going somewhere else with it. I mean, I was thinking and I'm like thinking on my feet at the moment just from listening that one of the things we might do is sort of say when presented with, I mean first of all, describing what we're talking about with unbridled discretion and then saying when this comes up, we would recommend that you all stop, I mean, I'm just stop, think, realize what the racial impact is and really take that into account before just willy-nilly, I mean willy-nilly, nobody does anything willy-nilly, but going right ahead without thinking those things through. And I think that that, there's a part of me that feels like that is a good enough description because we're not gonna be able to come up with every moment that, I mean, it's so pervasive. I'm not sure how this group is gonna come up with every instance in which that's gonna happen. That's what's concerning. However, I do think there were experts out there who we could request come talk to us. And who have suggestions and we can, as a group, because I think what we provide to the legislature is our diversity coming from within or without the criminal legal system. And if we, but we don't have the expertise, right? Individually, I said way beyond, but we don't have to be in that field. However, there are resources where we can identify, we have funds, I think limited funds available and people will be transported. David just made a very strange face. I don't know if it's part of you or something. Yeah, right here. He just wants a big lawsuit, please. So we can't, David, get some of it. People who aren't employed by state government do get a stipend for travel to and from the meetings. So if we frame it as a meeting, a portion of our group would be able to get that travel. But I meant more of an honorarium for a speaker to come or a consult console for an expert to be promoted. There's certainly no set aside funds for that. They would have to be in discussion. I see. A request to the legislature. Yes. Huh. You think you can make up pretty good with 58 cents a mile from DC or something. So I have not having been here for a couple of meetings, I had to check, but I think the work that was done in terms of identifying these bullet points would be called the sequential intercept model or however you're framing them. That could be a framework to look at the question of discretion, to look at each one of these categories and have a conversation. Certainly, experts are helpful, but there's also value to talking to people who actually practice in the community to talk about, okay, how are these decisions related to these things made and how much of it is discretionary, how much of it is unbridled and how much of it is actually based on parameters and then talk about how to improve that is one approach that I could see over time. I don't think it can be done quickly, but as you were saying to you, maybe these other panels who will continue to exist, can that could be part of their function? I just see so many, like you said, when you have unbridled discretion, I mean, you want your law enforcement officials to have some discretion, right? Because otherwise, some of it's a judgment call, but I also, I've heard this from law enforcement myself just talking, not knowing that I'm a minority myself and just thinking that, hey, I'm just another good old boy, talking that they're saying, well, if you don't want to be arrested and don't, what do you see on the news? Or what do you, then how come every time you see somebody arrested and they're on TV with Carrie Grubb or whatever? You don't know the backstory behind that, but they're reinforcing their own bias by saying everybody you see on TV that's plastered up that they were arrested are people of color or some other lower income or whatever. You know what I'm saying? You never see anybody in a supertot. You know, I mean, it's just, I think part of this goes back to, not only in my own mind, back to the education when you're first coming in, but also continuing cultural competency and collecting data like you guys were doing before, trying to say that if you had three arrests on this specific charge, how many of them were, you know, x, y, and z and trying to say and show people this is actually, you know, backs up the data that we all know is there. That part of it was trying to collect data we were looking at, I don't know if that was in your group but collecting the fair and impartial policing was trying to collect data. I think that only goes as far as you, right? It doesn't go down to the towns and the traffic stop data, that's all. CRG, Robin, that's the house. The people I heard from, they were more, they weren't state, they were local. They're dumping their traffic stop data into CRG. Everyone has to. So, I mean, I don't know the metric answer to this, so I'm just saying it's, but it's good. Well, we've talked about collecting data so we can understand the problem. We've talked about training, training whether citizens, we've talked about training police. I also would like to throw on the table, let's give some remedy, let's give some immediate remedy to the person actually who's actually been violated, who's actually been, you know, suffered at the hands and remedy being something immediate for that proceeding. Remedies we are very familiar with in criminal proceedings, suppression of evidence. This is a little of the prompt proceeding. There are sample statutes out there, something I recently dug out, suppression, I don't know, is anyone really familiar with the ADA? It's the pre-federal ADA version and it's on language interpreters, but specifically hearing and parent interpreters. And there's a statute in here, and I'll give you guys a site as soon as I complete this up. It's so specific to the hearing and parent community and it's title one, PSA 338, here's what it reads, it's very short, it's admissions confessions. An admission or confession by a person who is deaf or hard of hearing, made to a law enforcement officer or any other person having a prosecutorial function may only be used against the person in a criminal proceeding if the admission or confession was made knowingly, voluntarily, intelligently, not subject to alternative interpretations resulting from the person's habits and patterns. And during the admission custodial reasonable steps were taken to find a qualified interpreter. So this is a statute about how it's almost presumptively not, can't be trusted the confession if you don't have a qualified interpreter to navigate an interaction between hearing impaired citizen and law enforcement or prosecutor. Now here we have it, but it's specific to hearing impaired, not to language, limited English proficiency interpreters, not to anything else. I saw this recently in the case and I thought, wow, this, why here? And I listened to the committee discussions on this and this is an old statute, well, 1987. But my recollection was the discussion was, well, why, you know, at the end, why should we be doing this on narrowly? For just this particular community. Just with hearing. And the answer was, well, let's just roll this out, pass this, see how it goes, we can come back and expand it later. But the constituents who proposed this was the hearing impaired. And here we go and here we are. And I think very few people, this doesn't come up. I mean, how many criminal defendants are hearing impaired who pass, right? This serves as a model of a type of remedy that we can suggest to the legislature to be made available. Zullo, Vermont Supreme Court, suggested a remedy based on racial animus for civil proceedings. Nothing like that exists in the criminal, am I right? Is there a similar remedy in criminal court proceedings related to racial animus, similar to something? Suppression. It'd be suppression. Suppression, but not based on racial animus specifically. It's mostly, what would it be? I mean, if, if I'm, case gets. I want to remember everything I've said, nice, nice, nice. I just gotta get another computer. What do they have in my car? Case gets dismissed or evidence gets just suppressed based on, let's say, a stop based on profiling, like, right? I mean, so that's the remedy in the criminal process and then someone could bring a civil suit. But the analysis prohibits the defense attorney from arguing the subjective motivations of the officer. We have to look up on the objective officer in that arresting officer's position. And so that's how we have stripped out and turned into a color blind, race neutral standard. My suggestion is to specifically suggest to the legislature now, say it's actually permissible consideration. You're almost saying like that law, like you were talking about, could easily translate to a vibrant justice who's not their first language in English so they don't understand. In other words, not that their hard of hearing can't understand, but they just don't understand without an interpreter. Or maybe mentally ill or whatever that might have cognitive functions that they're impaired somehow. So is that what you're suggesting? Yes, I don't, and I haven't thought it through fully through to racial and in this side of it, but I'm just combining two different things. Certainly, I think with the hearing impaired, why not do it to the language interpreter? I don't really see the same reasons to do it. But the point back to you, Etan is, and I think you were suggesting too, I think it's possible for us as a group collectively to come up with some specific suggestions. Okay. Even though it might obviously be part of the conference. I don't think there's anything novel about the idea that there's discretion on the part of the police or prosecutors, and you can call it unbridled, but discretion by its very nature is unbridled. Can be unbridled. I mean, it's discretion. So I mean, everybody at this table recognizes that. So I'm not sure what we would present to the legislatures or recommendation of this committee, how to address that. Joe Dupirson, here's an example. Articulating the basis for suspecting this driver of a crime, consciousness of guilt. What was the evidence that was indicating consciousness of guilt? Nervousness, nervous behavior, sweating, looking away, running away, giving a different name. Now, let's add in some more factors. Officers, what? Person who stopped is African-American and female. At what point does the racial aspects to it cloud the officer's perspective that what that officer is thinking is consciousness of criminal guilt is actually a manifestation of total fear of the cops because they fear for their lives, right? And so, back to this discretion and the stripping out of what can you consider in that reasonably, because we fight everything from our perspective can be argued as supportive of consciousness of guilt and suspicious activity. And it's because you can strip out the race aspect to it and all of a sudden, everything is evidence of being nervous because you're hiding a guilty mind and there are lots of different reasons for it. I agree with that, except how do you challenge it at the time it's happening? The only way to challenge it that comes to mind is in a court proceeding. Oh, I don't disagree. I'm not trying to go for the novel procedural avenue to introduce the remedy request. I'm more, what is this test to get the remedy? Get into this? Yeah, that's an interesting idea, how to give a medium remedy. I mean, I don't think so. I'm open. I'm open. I'm open. The person in the car gets to say, I think they did it. I'm interpreting my total fear of you killing me as consciousness of guilt. I'm going to stop to this detection and I'm moving. What about, I have an idea, what if we jump, because we're not going to iron this out. I'm putting you on the spot and if I don't, if this is like really un... You're asking me for a drafting? I do. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I know, I know, I know, I know, I know. I'll help. How about, how about, how about you draft the IRP? No. Okay, and then I'm going to throw this, okay, okay, and then I'm going to throw this back and David, David, your minutes have to be swirling tonight. Okay, yeah. Right, I mean, and then because I'm just thinking that what we should do, I mean, I'm listening to all of this. We're not, they're like really good arguments all around and they're not completely reconcilable. So I'm feeling like let's write something down and then like bang it out from the standpoint of text and just go, okay, this, no, you know, however, let's replace it with this. Discard what I'm working draft. Well, you have now, like you have bullet points that people wrote and you have minutes from every meeting we've done. We're ready to go on. Good luck to you both. I'm just saying, I'm kind of sure it is to put it in the language. I think we do and that's why I want, I just, it was just sort of suggesting let's go ahead with that. I'm hoping to write more. I know, sorry, but unfortunately that's what we're doing. That's what we have to do. I'll take an initial step. But okay. Figure it out. Okay, okay. I'm gonna float it. Can we move on to the other bill that I wanted to bring up? Yes, Jeff. Regarding discretion, which is a very important one, there is a disparity that's always bothering me, which is very simply how large for us to walk up to you to the window you caught and lie. That's not a crime. That's good investigative procedure and totally academy. But if you lie in turn when you know the officer's lying to you, that's a crime. You're in violation. And that's a disparity to me. Now if you're, perhaps if you're with your attorney and they're in the room and there's an investigation, people have been advised that they're right, then it's a technique. But when it's on the side of the road at three in the morning, I saw you cross the white line. I smelled marijuana even though it's 100 degrees outside in the air conditioners or whatever. I think that I've always had a problem with that. And when you're discussing this in terms of discretion, that may be a point where discretion to a certain extent is being compromised. That's all I'm listening. Does that seem unreasonable? No, not to me. No, I'm all over it. I would support from peeling the false information to the officer's crime. Well, that's different. But you know what I'm saying. It's an uneven playing field. And I think it encourages some behavior which in turn encourages disparate treatment. I don't know what you're saying. Well, I think normally, my experience is with that. If you hear that type of case, it usually gets dumped pretty quickly so it doesn't really see the light of day. If a officer walks up and there's no evidence of video of the car crossing, so they start to go down that path and figure out that he's lying right then. And that's those cases usually are dropped or dead. They're not at least, in my experience, I don't know if another's going to add in. If they have body cameras. I mean, if we know of officers lying, I mean, I know there's a difference when you're talking about maybe a one-on-one interview where they're trying to kind of elicit a confession or something along those lines. But if we as prosecutors know a police officer is lying, we have a duty to disclose that at the defense bar. I think there was a case just recently in Washington County here. Yeah. It felt pled guilty to a charge. And I don't know how it came out right after he pled guilty, but I don't know. It wasn't on the video, it wasn't heard on the video. For some reason, after he pled guilty, they kind of somehow the case got reopened very quickly after that. And the video or body cam, whatever it was, did not indicate, did not show that he had consented to the surge of his car. And the police officer said, well, you can't hear what he gave and consented. So. What about a marijuana cocaine they had in there? I don't remember what they had in there. Well, I don't know about that case, but there was also a case in Chittenden County where an officer brought in his affidavit that he had smelt marijuana when, in fact, on his body cam out, he was reported him saying that he didn't smell marijuana and he was needed to try to figure out a way to get in the car. That case didn't go away. But it certainly wasn't their intention to have that conversation recorded, right? That part of the conversation. So, and for the record, that defendant was white. That driver was white. But, so the only reason that got uncovered was because they accidentally recorded themselves describing illegal conduct on their own part and which raises the concerns of how often are those conversations happening and not being recorded? Just to clarify, I think your point was actually more of what my understanding was more on James referred to briefly, which was the investigative tech, like the, trying to figure out what somebody knows, like in the course of finalistic confession where an officer's allowed to say something. To seven different things, yeah. I would, yeah, I think you're much more, my feeling is that untruths inspire untruths at the roadside, okay? And I don't know how to address that and I'm not very articulate in speaking of it, but I think they do. I think once you start stretching the truth then that's okay, because you're investigating it. Some guys call a window, some women's call a window. It's real easy to step over that line. And if the lawyer's present or you've been advised in your rights, you might know the game, but right then, I don't know, I don't even know what I'm talking about really, but I know what I'm feeling. Thank you. Okay, 518, H518, and this will be sort of a point, counterpoint, because I hear there's disagreement between two of our panelists, at least, on this, but I thought, Gary thought it would be important to bring up two, and so we're still alive It's still alive, there are partial policing and minimum training standards and such. It is a part that we didn't bring here, which the HRC added amendment on. I'm hoping David can, David would do a much better job of explaining all of it, which is how you do it. Multiple times. Do you want me to give a, all right. What's the disagreement? Oh, the disagreement, they don't agree, so. It's sort of a way to grant work on this. This is relating to the mandatory statewide adoption of a fair and impartial policing policy. The original law was passed in 17. Is that right? Yes, right. There was, it required the criminal justice training council and consultation with our office and stakeholders to create a model fair and impartial policing policy, which had to be followed. Essentially, all departments had to have the same elements that were in that, the same components as the order we're using, but had some flexibility to vary the language. The less controversial part of that has always actually been the biased policing part of it. It's really been a pretty uncontested aspect of this. The part that has been contested very strongly throughout is the relationship between local law enforcement and federal integration authorities, and that's really driving the discussion on this, and it's driving this bill. So the initial intention of this bill was to state more clearly that, or I should say, you know, our viewpoint of it was to change the law, to allow local agencies to be essentially more protective of information related to citizenship and immigration status than the model policy requires. They can't be less protective, they can't be more protective of that information, and it's viewed by advocate communities as being more protective of undocumented workers. So that was the primary purpose of this. There's also a few procedural changes that aren't really that important, and it has a secondary purpose of allowing our office and the state, generally, to no longer have to be making representations about the federal compliance of local agencies, which we felt would be helpful in our continuing arguments with the federal government about these issues. So that was the original purpose of the bill, and I can characterize our disagreements, and the captain can correct me. I think they're two-fold. One is the Department of Public Safety and Vermont State Police are worried about allowing this potentially more, this more protective language that individual agencies could adopt, potentially having that impact federal grant money, which has been an ongoing dispute between the state and the federal government, saying that where local agencies may choose to go beyond the line, maybe they'd choose to push so close to the line, to go past the line of not being in compliance with federal law, that could potentially impact state money, and I think the second aspect of their points is really around consistency and saying that, arguing that it is helpful for the policies to be as consistent as possible so citizens interacting with police agencies have similar expectations as a matter of their interacting with. And our office has felt that with the funding issue, we don't feel that the funding of local agencies is going to affect the funding issue. I should say that policies of local agencies are necessarily going to affect state funding, but I should say clearly we don't think that that's gonna be the case, and I won't bore you too much with the details of that argument, but I'm happy to get into it if you want. And we also felt that because the baseline of the model policy is very high in terms of how protective it is of undocumented individuals, including saying you won't ask about it unless it's necessary to an investigation, and really writing, we tried to write the policy very close to what's federally allowed in terms of really trying to be protective. So we didn't feel like the average citizen is going to feel a big difference in their interaction with agencies. So that's sort of, that's the characterization of the back and forth between our offices and general speaking about what this bill does. Obviously immigration issues, and work issues around undocumented workers are not necessarily also race-related, but as a practical matter, we all know that we generally are, and that's obviously underlying this argument. Right. Just a question, so I understand the fact that you don't want to try to find illegal immigrants or if you're trying to separate, in other words, you're not going on a seat before that, but are you asking with this bill that law enforcement don't enforce law? I'm asking the question because that basically, I know there's a separation of power between what immigration is supposed to do at a federal level and what local law enforcement is supposed to do, but if they do find that someone is illegal, what is this bill? Are you saying ignore it or are they saying just? I'm asking the question. Yeah, no, no, it's not a question, man. That's getting to the heart of the issue. The policy, as it already exists, has a bunch of parameters around what the local agencies can and can't do with relationship to the federal government. All this is really saying is you, you local agency, you can have requirements that are more protective around that information. I will say that the policy does not forbid, because it cannot forbid, in accordance with federal law, it does not forbid a local officer, or I should say an agency officer making a phone call to federal authorities about citizenship or immigration status, because that's explicitly what the federal law says we cannot forbid. But it does say, you're not gonna ask about it unless it's necessary to criminal investigation, which is likely to be a very narrow set of cases, like a human trafficking case or something like that. And it also says that information outside of citizenship or immigration status won't be shared unless there is specific public safety need to communicate. So there are sort of strict parameters, but that communication is not forbidden by the policy. So things I would add is that we had $2 million held up and that money was opiate funding, task force, members. And the way we kind of look at it is that numbers right there are what we're looking at, opiate deaths, problems and all these other contributing factors. This is a big pot of money for us to not have. And we still haven't had our certification signed off going to this point of where this is. And the federal government is not giving clear guidance on what can happen with this. So it just creates confusion, we're concerning. We're concerned about that. And so this seems like if we work so hard to get the fair and impartial policing policy to be adopted last year, now here we are again trying to do something different to it, it just is gonna, we're already seeing difficulties of implementing the current policy. We didn't, the legislature cut all the funding to have training, so agencies haven't trained. It took a little bit of time for agencies to adopt the policy. So I think there's just confusion, especially for the troopers or the people on the ground doing the work of having this policy to manage four times in about four years. So that is, I'm gonna, don't hold me to that statement, but it's been difficult to sort of get consistency and understanding of this, because this is, it's difficult for people to understand the federal law, but that means when you're coming in contact with the person who is, who's lived in the state, but doesn't have maybe legal status and what they can and can't do with that, it's just, it's confusing. We'll be confusing anyway. My mind is that you're asking law enforcement officers to uphold the law, but yet they'll wink, wink turn your head if it's, you know, how do they find out if somebody's actually legal? I mean, I'm just saying that's kind of a contradiction of what you're being taught. But anyway, I mean, I'm probably the wrong person to be in this conversation, because we know what happened with immigration with us. It's just so swell for me and our people, but I'm just- I think broadly speaking, the question is illegal and what is it and what's the mandate and what are, you know, resources are tight all around. So what should law enforcement in Vermont be focused on? And so that's where I'm just giving you- I agree, you shouldn't be out there searching for it, but I'm just saying is I'm just wondering what happens if you find it. That's all I'm saying. That's where, I was wondering, right? Where this bill would be, may or may not be, that's going into the discretion again. And again, those numbers, and like the numbers right there, what no one has brought up calls that I'm aware of going on looking would be around, but more often than not, comes up during the course of an arrest. Now this person is arrested and then the information comes up during that process. Like the incident. Then that's where immediately confusion starts with the officer is do I call or don't I call? What level of crime is this really? Is it, you know, a DUI one or is this a, you know? So that just creates a massive amount of confusion. Yeah, the only reason I wanted to ask you to remember that there was a time where the federal government was asking people to seek out and refine people where the state had said, I'm not gonna do that. There's not a big controversy about taking the funding. I'm sure it's a complicated question, but they denied or held back $2 million. Yes. And what's the rationale? They considered the entire state to be sort of that sanctuary state for lack of a better term, I guess. Yeah, I mean, they are arguing that the model, the policies that are being followed by state police and because that's really the agency that they are looking at, they're scrutinizing for state funding because they're the vector for that funding is out of compliance with federal law. And the argument in return is no, we're not. Really? Is there a suit? Is there some... We are not presently involved in litigation involving Vermont's money. But they do, I mean, when we get funds from the Department of Justice, we have to also certify certain things for them as well. So, yeah, and that's sort of the same position that the state police would be in. I think there wasn't a problem with that too, right? Yeah. Because they were considered a sanctuary city. And just one sort of overall policy point about it, and the policy idea behind this, the immigration sections of the fair and partial policing policy is really not sure that people who need the help of law enforcement services won't be afraid to call for those services. Right. Because that's the sort of baseline obligation for law enforcement, just keeping people safe and curing them to the place to go to. And that's why you're trying to make sure, separating out these two policy initiatives, one is a federal run around immigration priorities, and the other one is a states-based obligation to keep people safe. And then as a policy point, I would just note, this doesn't mandate any change to anybody's policy. And I find it unlikely that the model policy is going to change subsequent to this. Yeah. The second part, the HRC part, you can put it. Oh, yeah. So there's also been a proposal from HRC to basically give themselves the authority with short notice, I think the proposal right now, 48 hours, to search the records of any law enforcement entity to have fair and partial policing policies to make sure that they have the right policy and they're in compliance in terms of training and so on and so forth. That has been a point of contention. I mean, if it's an active investigation, that's a problem, right? Yes, in the legislative language that just came out, does carve out active investigations, is that those can be the subject of this review. But I think law enforcement has very serious concerns about closed investigations, or perhaps more in charge of something and now that material is going to be exposed to somebody else. So there's a lot of concerns about that. There's sort of a compromise proposal that's on the table also that just says we're going to make the complaint process more clear and transparent when you do have concerns about fair and partial policing but not actually change the enforcement mechanism. So one of those two, that's going to be considered tomorrow morning actually, and we'll see what happens with that. Anything else or, okay. Are you asking for us, are we just reviewing this? Are you asking for us? I'm just reviewing. I'm just putting in front of people if it inspires you as 460 did. Great, but no expectation. I have a question for Gary. Did we, I know as part of your stuff you were looking at gathering more data from tickets or other things. I'm sorry, I haven't been to some of those meetings. Did they actually start collecting more data or more consistent data? That's going to be coming up. So actually I'm going to email about that today. The state is moving towards the e-ticket sort of electronic ticketing which is going to allow more windows on the computer program. It doesn't allow it on the paper floor. So that's the complicated part of it. If we're, you could still always have the option to fill out a paper ticket and you won't have all these other options in fact. So we're trying to navigate that still. But hopefully the back end is where we want to add the passenger searches. That's usually a confusion on the paper ticket. If we search the car, but it's really the passenger that's been searched was getting bad data because it's really not the operator that's being searched. But we're getting checked off as the operator and we see that time and time again. That's not part of the work. So there's just, it's not consistently being filled out. So the hope is that we can now start to clarify if it's a passenger search or an operator search where does it need to arrest? Tickets, civil violation, things like that. And it's still self declaring of people's race because I know one time the officer was It's perception. Making a perception. It's officer perception. I remember at one point they were saying maybe an option to fill out, not if somebody would want to fill out the race. No, we're not going to do that. So are you saying by the e-ticket that you're bringing in that that means that all the data in there will be shared or only that it provides the opportunity of more data? At the end of the, hopefully at the end of the process everything will be dumped into this, everything would be shared, whatever happens on the back of that. So currently that's what happens. If it's in theory and the hope, right? If it's being filled out properly but everything that's filled out is dumped into the CRG website. And then that's the other side of that, making sure that's accurate. We do a very good, we have a woman that's really into it and she does the process of making sure everything's accurate. A local agency doesn't have the resources to do that. So they've just seen all kinds of errors in their duplication. The judicial bureau is the first part of our system beginning actually in another month to have the electronic file. So that information will be more accessible. We'll have more? Is now. Yeah, good. I have another question if people don't mind me asking questions. But I know that part of their policing policy is just cultural competency. You hammer that whole lot that's made some changes. So I guess my other question is, does do prosecutors, defense attorneys, judges, anybody in the corrections, are any of those departments required to kind of take the same intensive training like they would do at the training academy or other thing that might help change the, to educate people? I mean, is that something, if they don't, is that something we should recommend that, I mean, it's not just like something you take online for an hour. It's an actual, something that they go to the academy to actually have the training or have somebody come out and train them. It's agency specific for police too. Some agencies, there's no funding for it other than at the academy and initial. I understand. But I guess if we're trying to change the perception all the way down the line from arrest to, you know, defense attorneys and prosecutors and all of those corrections on the back end. I mean, wouldn't you think that it might help if they have the cultural competency training that you might have on the front line to make these discretionary, judgments because if they are, if they do have inherent bias, if they've never had an education on why that might be the fact, it might go all. I don't, I didn't realize. I mean, I was just asking, because I know it does work because when I, I mean, not to get off topic, but I came from Vermont, which is pretty white. My first duty station and my basic training was in Fort Jackson, South Carolina. I was pretty immersed in cultural competency. So I'm saying, but it makes your perceptions change about everything because you're around different cultures. I mean, you're getting the training, but I don't want to get it firsthand, but I'm talking about education reasons. You're talking about implicit bias training. Any training that has to do with cultural competency, implicit bias, I mean, whatever. I mean, I was asking the question because I'm not in where you are. If you guys are required to take those trainings. Well, for instance, this June, we have an annual judicial call with Karen Richards to come in and speak to all of the judges in a session reached out to someone who sort of defense attorneys meet at the same, roughly at the same time we do. And I understand they're bringing someone in. They wanted us to join with them on that person we had already committed to Karen Richards. So I think all of us are aware of the issue in trying to get as much training to. Right, but that's on your phone. I guess my question is when we're making recommendations for the legislators or for changes, should that be a requirement? You know, almost like the continuing ed kind of more required as part of. So we do have continuing education requirements to remain active members of the bar, the Vermont bar. And so that's why these trainings get scheduled every summer, you know, a few times a year. And I'm, but right now. That's not a man of this state. Right now, like the topics that we cover are totally up to us, right? Like we have a training director who comes up with a theme for the, you know, this year's training or whatever. So I do think that a lot more, I mean, implicit bias is a topic, you know, I mean, it's people are becoming more aware of it, but it is to your point, not a requirement of any type of training. And I don't know exactly what it would look like, but the general idea that you're making right now, I completely agree with that, like, that yes, that there should be some sort of, sort of required ongoing, you know, whether it's every other year or whatever, training in a lot of different areas of the criminal justice system. Rebecca and I actually talked to Stephanie, so Stephanie Segrino is the person who's gonna come, I think, now to our training this summer. And she was recently telling us that she had been brought on as an expert in a criminal case to testify at hearing, was it the sentencing hearing? I think it was the sentencing hearing in a case with a black defendant. I forget what county it was in, but a black defendant and his lawyer was white, the judge was white, the prosecutor was white, like every, you know, probably the law enforcement officers who invested in the case were white. And so she was brought in as an expert to talk about this bias, I guess, and the judge sort of asked her, okay, I hear what the problem is, but what's the remedy? And part of her answer was that implicit bias needs to be called out as contemporaneously to when it's happening as possible. So certainly training is not necessarily contemporaneous to when things are happening, but if it's an ongoing process, that may be as close as we're gonna get, right? I mean, I could even see that being beneficial in your department because there's so many cultural differences with children and their culture, it may not be bad and our culture may not be desirable. And then all of a sudden somebody calls and they say, oh, you just did this and oh, that's against our laws and so, you know, I mean, you run into that probably when it was being broken all the time. But what I'm just saying is that I can see this type of mandatory training of good reputation. Should I just, go ahead. Just from a legal standpoint to make it clear, it is not estimated for anybody other than people who exercise law enforcement authority, which is not the agency, I mean, I should say not the departments or things like that. So like, DOC wouldn't be part of that. Or our office wouldn't be part of that. So to your point, no, it's not part of it. It's not in the law right now. I think that's interesting. But it is part of what the other group is supposed to be looking at, because I believe that an executive part of that statute said that that training would have to be across state government. Right. So one of the things that I'll point out because I live with social workers all the time is that actually what my people tell me is that training has, and it sort of goes to the point that you would make, Susan, training has limited applicability. You know, but coaching is something that actually can be much more valuable. And it's harder mandate to be honest, but just to make that point is that there is value to things like mandatory training, but it's also worth thinking about actually having the contemporaneous approach is recognizing that coaching can be ongoing. And then we have to build the capacity to do those kind of things within our organizations, both to identify, but also to be able to support people to move forward. Which comes to the point that you may be in the, or whatever, one of the recent meetings where you were at, there, I think it's been bold in the minutes that you talked about. That's well thought out. About different agencies being mandated to have a person identify as maybe this type of role in their agency. Can I? Yeah, sure. If it's quick. My question was, are you suggesting like an implicit bias training in or coach or a cultural awareness education? I guess my question is, this panel is charged with trying to make a difference in criminal legal justice, at least specifically. I mean, but I'm saying is we have a unique opportunity to not only maybe mandate where we can, but highly suggest in other areas that the legislators, because it's such a topic right now with systemic racism and there's a panel and there's other people looking at it, that we at least put it on their radar because I think part of what that, the reason why I'm making this, I'll try to make it quick, but part of this big packet that I gave you was they're saying we should look at it every facet of the criminal justice system. I'm saying is if that's not mandatory now, why not? Because if it's making a difference for the state police, why wouldn't it make a difference in the rest of the justice system or beyond? If we want to change the direction of what's happening? Maybe I'm wrong, maybe I'm wrong, I don't know. Anyway, I'm sorry, you want to take it? Well, I'm just coming at it from a different perspective and sort of just sharing because I think the Department of Corrections is there's a lot of training around culture but in a different capacity, right? So a lot of the things that we focus on first are gender, gender responsive, trauma, lots of conversations about women's pathways to violence, safety for the LBGTQ community. So there's a lot of that that gets talked about very much at our corrections academy and then reinforce through training and then we don't have to the degree that the State Police Academy has a whole section on implicit bias but what we're looking at is where do we take all of that work and bring it into the work that we're already doing and make it just sort of foundational across all of the stuff we're teaching at the academy. Yeah, and that's kind of the way that we're thinking about doing it. No, that'd be quick. Yeah, no, I really got it. I barely got it, I know this long. I've got it, I'm sorry. The important thing that I really wanted to get done with this meeting and I'm sorry to cut the conversation off but there were three people who were not at the last meeting who were not able to participate in that collaboration discussion around the bullet points that we had that I at least found very, very fruitful and productive and that was Monica and Ken and Judge Gerson and I would like, we only have half an hour left and so I really want to give you three in particular an opportunity to weigh in on this, particularly because, and I'm just skipping a little ahead here on the agenda, we're probably not gonna meet next month. The plan that I have in my head is I'm gonna start drafting and I'm gonna send things to you by email. There's no reason for everybody to be driving all over Vermont. Beautiful state, enough already. And so I will just start. I think we're done with the fleet though, by the way. We could drive there, we might be done. We could drive, we might be done. I mean, I don't wanna, you know, jump to anything. I'm just gonna be here in May anyway. Oh well, here we are. Can I just quickly say though, Scheduling Wise June is gonna be a problem because I think the week that this meeting would be is the week of all these training. The training is that the defense bar and the judges and prosecutors all schedule every summer. Well, hmm, I'm gonna just think about things then. Thank you, thank you, thank you for putting that out. I can't come up with a good answer right now, but thank you. We'll think of something. But anyway, I just wanna put that out there. But that's why I wanna move us along right now because I wanna hear from these three people so we can actually move everything that we're doing as a panel forward. I'm sorry. Okay. Ken, do you wanna start? Sure, I don't mind. So as I looked at this and thought about it, my world's a little different because I'm not in the criminal justice, it's juvenile justice, which some certain things are definitely comparable and transferable if other things are quite different. So as I look at this though, of course, many of the principles are certainly the same. So youth, I mean, I'm youth who get involved with law enforcement for delinquent acts, I think the issues are probably all the same. And so the reality would be to whatever extent that there is interaction between law enforcement and for example, the courts, my department, I think the kind of things we're talking about in terms of implicit bias, making sure that we do have appropriate training and decision-making, all I think are comparable. For me to cut to the chase, I think the most concerning aspect of our system in terms of juvenile justice, in terms of disparities has to do with detention and particularly in Woodside, in that it is disconcerting to walk into that building and see the high numbers of people of color. And so it's definitely, we've done some things to be clear in terms of looking at that system. And so the law was changed a couple of years ago to make it clear that decisions with respect to whether or not a youth would be detained at Woodside is actually now up to the judge at predisposition phase, whereas it used to be a little bit fuzzier in terms of who made that decision. I'm going back to the earlier conversation, but the discretion is pretty broad to be candid. It's not like bail in the juvenile system. It's more whether or not the youth would be at risk of harm to themselves or others. So it is arguably broader. But one of the things that was included in the statute, and this goes back to the control issues that we talked about a little earlier before the meeting started, is even if a judge orders a youth to go to Woodside, the commissioner of the department for children and families actually has the discretion to allow that youth to be placed at an alternative spot if we think that the youth can be safe and not risk of harm to self or others so that we have actually some discretion to move the youth out of Woodside, which has some value in terms of trying to manage that. We do have some tools that we use with respect to who should be at Woodside. There's a lot of research around the country because this has been in the youth systems around the country, disparate minority confinement is a major problem of substantial degree. And having objective instruments is oftentimes a way to try to deal with that problem. And we're working with UVM to develop some instruments for here. But so I think for me, that's one of the issues of concern. The other thing we've done is through an entity that's affiliated with DCF, the Children and Family Counselor Prevention Programs, which gets some federal money. We've given a grant to the Association of Africans Living in Vermont to try to develop some approaches to work with families and young people to try to address issues upfront as from a prevention approach to try to avoid the need for detention. Frankly, I think we need to do some work to have that be more effective, but that's one of the approaches we've taken to try to address that issue. And I think that from our perspective, we clearly have some work to do in that arena. And so that doesn't, because the system is different, it doesn't quite fit neatly into these bullet points, but I do think it's a detention issue. And to that extent is definitely very relevant, and I think it's something that we need to continue working on from my perspective. And so I think for me, that's the biggest issue that I would identify. I mean, based on the data that we've seen, some of the disparity actually does tend to even out once you get to actual disposition, meaning the disposition phase is somewhat akin to sentencing for those of you familiar with the system. But again, it's not based on an allegation related to the crime. It's again related to whether or not the youth needs to be in state custody or not. And then it could, because more often than not, the decision is actually not state custody. One of the things that actually is good in Vermont with respect to delinquencies is actually those are continuing to go down. The percentages of kids coming into custody for delinquencies, even with adding 16 and 17 year olds, again, without getting into the leads, that was used to be more discretionary. Now all of those are primarily in the youth system. The numbers of delinquent kids in custody is going down. So that's a good thing. And actually, again, just to mention it, 18 and 19 year olds, the legislature has decided that in coming years, those are gonna be in the family court system, not the adult criminal system. And so I think it's another area though that we're gonna have to be mindful of to make sure that issues related to implicit bias and disproportionate minority involvement in the system, we need to make sure that as the age group increases in terms of the family court system, that we're mindful of those issues. So I'll sort of stop there, but I don't have questions or comments. Am I right though in saying, oh, the court can now place someone in the wood side if it requires a recommendation? Yes, that's so the other piece. Thank you, I appreciate it. So that's right. So that was the other safeguard that was put into place. So in fact, if DCF recommends that the youth be placed in a community-based program or with their family, then the judge can't place the kid in wood side. So we've done a variety of, and again, obviously that's not limited to just issue of race, it's just generally speaking to try to utilize wood side to the least extent necessary. Anything else? Thank you. You got that down, David? I hope so. I'm like totally paranoid now. It's like, did you write that comma down? Monica, do you wanna? Sure, just looking through the notes that I had. It seems like so long ago. One of the things about this report, and I know everybody knows this, but I just wanted to say this, is that they took each of these sections that were related to probation, parole, re-entry, incarceration, and broke it out as if there were different organizations overseeing them, because in a lot of states, that's accurate, and that's not true in Vermont, right? So all of those categories, they repeated themselves a little bit in terms of the recommendations they made, and all of those things are things that the Department of Corrections is responsible for doing in terms of the supervision. So there's some other funky legal things that happen around parole in terms of probation, in terms of who's the accountable, violating authority, judiciary, parole, or corrections, and that gets into this concept of legal statuses, and we've been talking about legal statuses, a fair amount at the legislature, David, and the Commissioner of Correction is around the disparity that actually exists between people on furlough and people who are on parole in terms of the way they get violated, and so those are some things that we're working on. I didn't write this in this report that I originally submitted, because this is kind of new, but it's making me think about the fact that these are some things that could contribute to disparities, and these are things that we're gonna be working on over the next few years. Anyway, the legislature is pretty much doing as we need to do that, but I'm just sort of sharing that, because I think it's related to this, because all of those things are like legal statuses. I know we've talked about collecting data a lot and reporting data, and since I'm usually on the, at least from a corrections standpoint, the receiving end of those requests and having to report them, I just think it's fair to acknowledge that the capacity and resources within a lot of organizations to accurately correct, collect, and report out that data is really, really small, and so if we wanna do that, I think we have to think about a way of also recommending that there's some resource around that. Resource in terms of making it possible? Like people or money, right? Right? Because... Or both. Or both, right? Ideally, like a neutral... Yeah, sure, I mean, that's somebody, though, who has a state-of-the-art mod, complete, and collecting all the data, who knows how to do all these things. Right, yeah. But I think that we talk about that, but it will have a small law enforcement organization have to be responsible for that, and I mean, people would think that an apartment of corrections could have a lot of that capacity, but in fact, we really don't, in terms of the people power. Anyway, that's totally different. That's good to know. Yeah, I think it's really important for us when we talk about data to really think about that. Somebody has to do it, it doesn't magically appear. It's not a dream of truth. I think it also might be interesting to, if the group wanted to talk about things that are in place in Vermont, that are already potentially in line with this report, so some of the things that I noted were the fact that, at least in the corrections system, we do use a graduated sanctions system. We do use objective risk assessments tools. We have a very clear grievance process that's defined in our directives, and we do access a lot of resources from professional associations. And we're always looking at best practices from across the country to try and, I think it'd be important to acknowledge that. Also, agree with everyone that more training is important than we acknowledge that we definitely think that training is important. So I would not object to that at all, but that also usually requires a resource. Yeah. And that we also need to think about our staff recruitment, because that was one of the things that the other report really talked about. It's like, how do you recruit staff and bring staff in so that your staff are diverse and representative and that sort of kind of, and for the past few years, it really works with the Department of Human Resources on some recruitment strategies to broaden our recruitment efforts. Our focus right now is quite honestly, is on female correctional staff, because that's where we have a pretty big gap in terms of being able to diversify. But we're definitely working on it. So that was sort of a different take on this whole report when I was in the department. Any questions? Thank you. Do you have anything that you want to, you wrote me that wonderful email that was so succinct? You know, the email, I don't know if you've shared it with us. I haven't yet, no. So I think I can sum it up pretty quickly. I have it. I looked at the other comments by folks in Canada, obviously the courts, biggest areas of the exercise of discretion at the beginning of the process, at arraignment, at bail, setting bail or not setting bail, conditions are released. And that's a back end at sentencing. There have been a couple of studies done in Vermont, primarily by CRG on sentencing. And I can't say they've been extensive, but they have not, at least the studies that have been done, have not demonstrated evidence of bias in sentencing. I think one of the factors, and I'll get into it later, is one of their studies talked about the impact of out of state criminal records, and the difference that that can make, at least in their statistic. But before we get to the sentencing phase, the detainee population for whatever reason, over 10 years or more that I've been involved in the system remains fairly constant. It's about 300, 80 to 400 people every day. And that number, I know the department, everyone's why it was a snapshot. I know we did one, I think it was last fall, there were about 400 people in there. Almost half were being held without bail. The other greatest number was serious felonies held on bail. And the numbers for misdemeanor or non-violent offenses generally run about 20 to 30 people every time they take a snapshot. And there's one here, I think it was January 19th this year. There were 22 misdemeanor, they classified as misdemeanor persons, personal offenses, 12 of those, more than half of them were domestic assaults. So then if you take away those 12, you're down to less than 20 misdemeanors. And even that population, you cannot tell why they're being held unless you drill down into the individual case. And by that, I mean somebody could be on furlough status, they could go out and they could go into a store and grab a bottle of beer or something. They're held on a petty larceny charge or a new charge. When they come into court, they're probably gonna be held on furlough violation anyway. So we, they're not going to be released. But somebody will say, well, let's set $50 bail. So they're getting credit on the new term. Just remind that we close the day to clock. Thank you. Definitely, thank you. So pick up the pace. So you really have to look at the individual offenses because some of them are, there's a very historically, there's a very small population of non-violent misdemeanors. Right. And that population, as far as I know there's never been a study done. I do know that Senator Sears and some other folks are probably going, they've been talking about the detainee violation a lot in this sector. There aren't any bills now that are addressing it. There's going, that's right. There's going to be some. We met recently, a group of us that I expect that discussion probably to start in earnest this summer and maybe lead to something then. But that would be interesting. You know, we've talked to all of us at different times about data and I was struck by Gary's comment that in identifying race, it's perception. And I think as important as the data is that we need more, we need better data. We really have to have in mind the source of the data that people are looking at. In other words, if you look at court data, we do very little independent data gathering. In other words, we're relying on the information that comes from the police and then comes through the state's attorney's office with a file. We're just putting that into our system. It's not as if we do- You're not making a judge. Exactly. And so that data is critical but you have to look at the source of it. Going back to the sentencing piece, I think CRG felt that other state records were a significant factor, could be. And I think, and I mentioned it in my email, I think it's important because by the time these cases get to us at the back end, sentencing, 95% of the cases that come before us had clear reasons between the defense and the state that are presented with the judges. And yes, we can reject those agreements. Usually not done very often. At that point in the process, the state and the defense have a much better understanding of the facts and the strengths and weaknesses of a case. Maybe victim reluctance in wanting to testify. There are a number of reasons why they're presenting that to us. But one of the factors in the sentencing can be someone's out of state record. And as you talked, Jeff, about the process in New York City, all we're seeing is a conviction for some offense out of New York, Jersey, or wherever, Pennsylvania. We don't know what goes into that record. It may in fact be one of these cases where they're stopping for us without justification, led to an arrest, led to a detention in New York. They're only gonna sit in jail so long before they plead guilty just to get out because of the demand. But that is a record that then comes to us at the beginning and is a factor in setting bail, which can be a factor in detention, which can be a factor in sentencing. So I think we really have to look at that data and how do we separate the good data from the bad? Right. Rebecca. Del Poso, did you see Chief Del Poso's recent data report on bail in Chimpton County? I just got it. It reveals there's a racial despair treatment. But it's an interesting point on how and which data we should be looking at. Okay, good. I'm glad you have that. Rebecca, we're gonna do a survey. The Chief Del Poso. You gave it to me. Oh, I gave it to Rebecca. I could share it with the group for sure. Oh, I'd be really interested in it. Yeah. Yeah, that's fine. I was just curious. No, I was just curious if it's something he put out or if it was something he was just keeping track of. Give it to me if you could tell me that I couldn't share it. There you go. I think it's been distributed to any number of people. Yeah. Okay. Just ask 18 of us. I heard it just came out. Like he released something publicly, but you're saying he's handed something out to people. Internal confidential. No. No. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. It's a reflection, though, that they're, and Dr. Stephanie Senguano's data certainly countering CRG. Certainly, there are different results out there. I just wanted to share that. Yeah, it'd be interesting to look at. I would, I'd like to see it. Yeah, probably. I mean, that would be, thank you. Thanks. I'd be interested, too, it's based on everything. There's not enough resources. I worked with the UVM quite often that they have a whole department that collects data for the state, whether it be census data, all kinds of data, they use it for community service law grants, they, I mean, they're contracted by the state, I believe, to do, to gather all kinds of those data. I'm not sure if they, during the census, if they collect data. I think it'd be really important to have a conversation just about, not to get really detailed, but about how data is collected, different systems of data, and why just, and why having an external organization to say, oh, I'll come in and do it for you, is also equally extremely difficult. And, well, no, not even that. I'm literally talking just from the actual, like, logistics of it. And not that we would be opposed to it, but I think everybody's got their own system for collecting it and understanding it and pulling it out, which usually is more complicated than it should be, in my opinion, it's complicated. All right. Thank you. I appreciate getting something from everybody because I really wanted to hear from everybody before I started this task. I will do the best I can. It's not gonna be, you know, William Blake, but I will do my best. As I say, we won't meet on the 14th of May, which would be our normal time to meet because I've really got to start doing this. If I'm not in touch, it's not that I'm not thinking about it or doing, it's that I'm doing. You're doing, doing. And feel free to be in touch. I will be in touch as soon as I can.