 We were waiting for Laura, who takes minutes, but Shereen will take minutes while Laura is coming. She's just, oh, there she is. She's making some copies. I was just going to- did you- I already- we already did that. Can I have that sign in? Yep, yep, thank you. Okay, so first item on the agenda is any additions or modifications to our agenda tonight. Okay, and then next up is the public forum. And what I had asked folks to do, because we want to make sure that we get everybody in and have the availability to speak, is we have a list of folks. We have one, two, three, four, five people on the list. What we're- Shereen is actually going to keep the time so that you have four minutes of uninterrupted time to address the police commission. And what Shereen will do is when there's a minute left, she'll just raise her hand. And then when time's up, she'll just raise her hand, okay? We do have five. If anybody feels inspired that's not on the list after the five folks go, please just let us know and you can come on up, okay? So the first person is Annie. Annie, Mick. It's okay. How do you say it? Just for the- how do you say it, Annie? Mac and Annie. Mac and Annie. No one's ever gotten it, you're totally fine. But thank you. Yes. So I just have a few questions for the commission. Namely, are you still planning on increasing the number of officers in the police force? Are there any plans to cap the totals of numbers of officers? The chief himself actually during the city council meeting stated that it would take a significant number of officers to be converted into social workers to make a significant change in the way that the force runs and the way that our city operates. And are there any plans to hire social workers and social service providers in the place of police officers? So those are my questions. Those are a lot of questions. Well, the resolution from city for between before city council yesterday did not get passed, you know that, right? About social workers. And you know that we do have some social, we have two social workers, right, chief? Yes, that's correct. And we have, we can hire up to 100 or 140 something. Yeah, so there are no plans to do anything differently than what we're currently doing. Unless, chief, do you want to respond to that? Yeah, so there's no plan to cap the number of police officers any less than our capacity to hire up to 105. We do have two clinical social workers and an epidemiologist employed by the police department. They also work closely with the street outreach team from the Howard Center. I was speaking with Bob Bick this morning about number one, expanding their capacity and also possibly co-locating them at the police department. Because they're a vital intervention and de-escalation capacity that we've worked with for years. And their staffing, the city contributes to the staffing, so does the marketplace, so does the Howard Center. And it varies from like three to five or four to six. But I would like to pursue the opportunity to get it up to four to six so that they can partner with police officers to do interventions in mental health and homelessness crises out in the community. Well then I guess I suppose like if that's not something that you can answer right now. I guess I could reframe that question as do police commission, anyone on the police commission see that as like a worthy goal or something worth pursuing? Well I can answer. I think anytime that we can partner with community agencies and provide support to citizens and provide support to police officers who are dealing with all sorts of mental health issues in the field, I would support that. So part of the question I guess is whether this is question and answer moment here for us or are we here to just hear some concerns and then discuss those. I don't know, I'm not lobby one way or the other, but I'm not sure if I'm clear as to, you know. Well I think Annie's, Annie you're, it is usually just public comment. That's why I assumed you would have all the public comment and then answer the questions as they came, because I know there are other people with questions as well. But I figured since you responded to me immediately I may as well clarify the question. If you're not able to answer it, answer it however makes sense to, so that we can get an answer that we actually understand what's going through the commissioner's brains right now, in light of the new information. But I can let other people speak as well, if, yep, okay, thank you. Thank you, task force, yeah, who's next? Next on the list is Pierre Dre, sorry he can't read the writing. It's not like you said, Deirdre. Deirdre, sorry Deirdre. Yeah, I have a question as well, so for later. For some context, the Washington Post published that in 2017 of the police shootings about a tenth were captured by body cam footage. And so I wanted to ask if the Burlington Police Department plans to have, or does have 100% adoption of body cameras. And if there are plans for guidelines around releasing body cam footage to the public. And lastly, if body cams, body cameras can be meaningful transparency tools without timely public release of footage. Okay, thank you. Thank you. Brian Clifford? I think I got that one right. Thank you. I guess I have a question as well. This is regarding the recent body cam videos of the arrests of Mabior Jock and Jeremy Melly, the Burlington Police Department use of force policy states that verbal and nonverbal commands should be given to direct and let a subject know what is expected of him or her. I'm just wondering if those scenarios should have involved some sort of verbal or nonverbal commands and kind of what the breakdown there might have been if that is the case. Thank you, Brian. Lauren Kennedy? I have a comment and a question. Okay. I just wanted to clarify in light of the resolution that was shot down by city council and the general discussion and response around that. That people are asking the, I want to clarify that people are asking the police to go against, it's their own institution and against the cover each other asses like culture in order to justly serve the greater community and that failing to hold officers accountable for crimes is not justice and it condemns and endangers the community that the police serve or are supposed to serve. And while officers may feel demonized and demoralized, the community has been feeling demonized and demoralized by the police for many, many years. And the community, particularly people of color, homeless people, don't have protection from the police and that is my comment. And then the question is on Wednesday, May 29th, multiple body cam videos were posted to the department's YouTube channel. Why were they posted and why were they promptly taken down? Brian Waters? Thanks. I thought my statement was short, but I guess it'll be a bit longer than the previous ones. But before I started, I just wanted to acknowledge to the chief that I spoke over you at a city council meeting a few weeks ago. But also, this is an acknowledgement and not an apology and you can take that however you will. But the reason I'm not apologizing is that people in this community are angry. They've been angry for a long time and right now they're speaking out. And when people are angry, especially when they're angry about physical violence, which is the ultimate form of incivility, I think that a little bit of incivility and speech is okay. And I think that if I were to apologize, I think I'd be apologizing on behalf of some really valid feelings within the community. So it's an acknowledgement, not an apology. You can take that as you will. Anyway, the reason I'm here is to bring up something that I haven't heard mentioned publicly, or at least in a public forum type setting yet, which is that a few weeks ago, before that very same meeting, the BPD sent three cops to monitor a speak out about racism and police violence that had been organized by Black Lives Matter of Greater Burlington, and I think maybe some other groups. And since this is a public forum, I guess I'll pose my questions as a statement. But I'm wondering why the BPD thought that was a necessary step. And for the folks behind the camera, I'll preface this by saying that I'm not a fan personally of terms like community policing and progressive police. But for a department that prides itself on those things, and you don't understand how you thought it would be acceptable or okay to send police to such a speak out. I think you have to put yourself in the shoes of someone who maybe has experienced police violence. They may have had a traumatic experience with police violence, and they might have something to say. And imagine how much more difficult that might have been with three police officers in the back sort of monitoring the speak out. So, thank you. Does anybody else have any comments that they would like to make that's not on the sign up sheet? Ann? I thank you, Michelle and everyone else for inviting us to be here. I'm Ann Jaroski, I work at the university. And I'm here because I really just kind of wanted to get a feel for what this group does, what this group is like, and the reason for that is because I was so disturbed after seeing the video that all of you I know watched. And I just couldn't imagine how a group of people could vote to say that that was okay, that the actions, the punishment was okay. And so I'm just trying to get a feel for how this group works and how a decision like that could be made. So that's what I'm here for and I guess that's all I'm going to say. Thank you. Thanks, Ann. Anybody else? Mark, we'll get to you right after. Go ahead, come on up. You could just say your name too. My name is Kina Thorpe. I was born and raised in Vermont. I'm 24, 24 now, so I've lived here for 24 years. And like growing up here, I never felt afraid of police officers, and I think that part of that might be that I'm biracial. And I, most of the time, was with my white family, who, even though some of that family got into trouble with the police a lot, I never saw or heard them talk about having excessive force used against them. Trust me, like some of the people in my family are people who like to not like people for no reason. So were there to be incidences of police brutality used against them, they would have something to say. And so I work at the Peace and Justice Center and that combined with being a black woman who lives in America. I'm obviously very in tune with the incidences of police brutality that are happening all over the country. And up until a couple months ago when I saw the body cam footage, part of me was still in denial about the fact that something like that could happen here. Because it didn't match the experience that I'd have being sheltered by the whiteness of half of my family. And so, and going to the city council meeting that happened a few weeks ago. And seeing how, when prompted by one of the speakers about how many people had seen the body cam footage, how there were a couple of our city councilors who hadn't seen it, it really disturbed me. And seeing that compared with some of the comments on, and I know that social media isn't the best way to gauge general consensus. But seeing the things that people had to say about the incident, about how he deserved it for being drunk and disorderly, which I think a lot of people have been in their life. Combined with just this wall that's been put up between the, well not put up, but that has been there between the police and the people. It just seems like a complete and total lack of empathy for the victims, the direct victims of these incidences, as well as the people like me, who are now terrified or have been terrified, who are experiencing the shared trauma. And so I'm just wondering, just asking for one minute, if we can just stop having this discussion as if it's some fictional, heady thing and like really get to our hearts and just be honest about the fact that what we saw was horrible and it's impacting people and something needs to be done about it. Because talking to us like reading off a script and being robots is not the way to solve this problem. Like we want to hear honest answers and we want honest solutions. And I feel, and I think a lot of other people feel like we're not getting that. Because it's easier to read off a script than it is to come from the heart and be honest. So I'm just asking you to do that. Thank you. Good evening. Hello. Hi, I'm Mark Hughes. I'm with Justice for All and I apologize for being late. I was just over at the nominations committee meeting tonight. It looks like you guys have ten applicants for the commission. So yeah, I wanted to just offer a couple of brief comments, Madam Chair, just about the recent events with the I guess it was 17 or so students that were asked to get off the school bus over in the old North End. And just wanted to bring out just a couple of thoughts on it and also leave you with just some suggestion, Brandon. And I think that there's so much attention and there's so much time being spent to have a conversation about whether the kids were naughty or whether they were deserving of discipline or whether their parents should have done a better job at doing maybe they needed to be put off the bus. Or it wasn't racism, move along, nothing to see here. Obviously if there were white kids that were also removed from the bus while those black kids were removed from the bus, it couldn't possibly have been racism. So there's just in all of those, I think, are just distractions. If we're gonna talk about policing, because there was a crime that was committed. It seems as if there's a crime that was committed because if I took a five-year-old or six-year-old or a seven-year-old, and dropped them off in a neighborhood anywhere in town because they were being naughty, or no matter what they look like, you'd have DCF crawling up my butt. And not only that, I'm sure it'd be a legion of cops standing in line to question me as to what the hell is going on. So I think there's a law enforcement accountability, a responsibility, rather. That, and here's the other dimension of it, is whether there was white kids involved or not just occurred to me that here we are again, just like we were in Bennington, asking the police to prosecute a crime that's being perpetrated allegedly against at least the vast majority of which are people of color. So here we go again. So we failed to do that in Bennington. We failed to do that. Erica and Paul did not prosecute a crime. TJ did not prosecute a crime. And what we walked away with out of that was freedom of speech. Freedom of speech when there were at least three laws on the books that could have been prosecuted. And I think what people of color are experiencing, let's just talk about the repercussion of that for a minute, and I'm going to just take one more minute, Madam Chair, okay? Reprecussion of that is that an emboldened white supremacist and white folks and folks who would seek to bring harm to people of color across this entire state, hands down. And what it did is it made black and brown people feel less safe, period, okay? So what that does is it also establishes a precedent, okay? Because law enforcement, they don't necessarily feel like they have to prosecute these crimes. I think a part of the thing in our close here is that this is a part of a larger issue that we have. I don't know whether anybody has looked around lately, but we got a national crisis right now. It's not because things have recently changed, because we've always been a racist nation, but it's, I mean, you know, we got another Woodrow Wilson in the White House. So what I'm urging, what I'm asking you to do, Brandon, is prosecute the crime, okay? If there's a crime that's been violated, find it, get out your book Dustoff Title 13, find out what's going on, who did what, who recklessly endangered those children and why, okay, and prosecute them to the fullest extent of the law. That's what I'm asking you to do. So, you know, find Sarah, have a conversation, do your job, prosecute the crime, lead by example. Thank you. You all? My name is you all, and this question is to anyone who has a kid, particular to Michelle, you know me, Michelle, for 14 years, and, and knowing me for 14 years, if that was one of your kids, one of your son, do you think that your answer would have been your comments would have been the same as you put them out to the public? And the reason I ask you that is I'm still struggling how to turn to communicate with you, because I was very upset. And these are the kids that I actually grew up with. And that could have easily been me in the video without doubt. And, and I just cannot quite figure out how could someone with the kids look at those videos and, and, and, and say that's okay. So that's, that's my question. Thank you. I think two other people stood up. My, my name is Jennifer Decker, and my question or comment is how do we as a community get from police brutality to police accountability? And one question that I have in light of that is that we have two police officers who as far as I understand it may be still on the street who've made very poor judgments to the point that they ought not to be in that role anymore. And I understand that there might be rules and laws and lawsuits and that type of thing that may interfere with people asking those individuals to take responsibility. However, I think that there are some avenues in terms of directly holding people accountable that must be pursued. One thing that really concerned me when I was at the city hall was that I was hearing from the leadership some sort of case building around exonerating certain individuals as well. I was aware that there had been an initial possible attempt to cover up the role of individual in the death of Douglas Kilburn. And that perhaps I'm don't have all the most up to date information about that, but I was not clear as to whether those issues were actually resolved. And from my perspective, they weren't resolved to my satisfaction. And I think it is your responsibility as a commission to hold people responsible for their actions. Now, I used to work at the Howard Center and I'm actually very good at deescalating conflicts. I do it without any weapons. And I really honestly think that one place, if we want to recruit responsible police officers, would be to recruit people with mental health background who've had to deescalate conflicts without weapons and to use their wits. And I think that one of the things I learned in the context of my career as a mental health therapist is that there is a trajectory, a developmental trajectory in regard to how people are willing to take responsibility and be accountable. And it's a immature perspective to be primarily concerned about whether you're going to be in trouble for what you've done as opposed to being primarily concerned about the impact that you've had on other people. If I had ever hurt a child in my employment at the Howard Center, I would have actually voluntarily resigned because I don't think that it is healthy, helpful, or appropriate to be in a profession where you cause harm. And so my question is, with the individuals who are still on the street terrorizing my community, who is holding them accountable? And I think that one thing that's actually very bad for people, whether they're children or whether they're adults, is to pretend that they've done good or that they've done well or that they are free from responsibility for the mistakes that they've made. That's not helpful. And I hope that you all see your responsibility in terms of holding people accountable. When you have relationships with those individuals, it's up to you to take steps to put them in a position where they feel that accountability. Does anybody else have any comments they'd like to share? So here's, there's a lot of questions. We can't get to all of them. Typically, this is just a public comment time where we look forward to feedback and input from community members. But I would like to share something. And then if any of my other commissioners would like to as well, I think if I have given comments that have contributed to people feeling like I don't care and you all thank you, I really appreciate it. It takes courage to come and actually say that to me in public. So thank you. Or that any of my fellow commissioners don't care. I just want to let you know that it was hard for all of us to watch that. We did spend hours in executive session. It it's not that anybody thought it was okay or that anybody took anything lightly, including the leadership of the police department. We for for whether you agree or don't agree, we did go through a process that I can say I believe had integrity, the process. It was not that anybody thought that it was seriously or that it was that it was okay. It was hard for everybody and like I said, whether you agree or disagree with the outcome, the care and the compassion and the heart were there. Not only for what happened, but mostly how do we not have it happen again? So that's that's and maybe the chief in his comments wants to adjust some specific things. But from my perspective and I and and I want to say from my perspective, it is really meaningful and important to me that all of you came up and shared what you shared. Because it's not easy to share things that you feel like you're you know, you might feel vulnerable sharing them to us and it's it's meaningful. So thank you. And I just want to piggyback on that. So, you know, one of the things we're struggling with in this is that we can't speak about the details. So I know someone, you know, there are some questions directed at how we could think something in what we saw and so I gave a public comment at a press conference. And I think when you're talking about robot robotic and not having emotion, it could be me you're talking about I spent a day prepping that statement because that's not my job media comments. I was very nervous, but I also was struggling with how I really want to be able to give as much information. But we have this obligation that we can't talk about personnel matters. So that's a difficulty for us is struggling with wanting to be transparent, but respecting respecting the privacy, the confidentiality obligations with personnel matters. So your comments are well taken. I mean, I probably was very robotic giving a public statement, but you know, we're human and the nerve. I know that that was extremely nervous and I thought about every word because I wanted to be very accurate. And I wanted to convey that there's, you know, we wish we could talk about it openly and talk about how do we, how have we arrived at recommendations and we're also advisory in nature, which I think gets lost, you know, we struggle with what what is our power? What do we do as a commission and we're advisory. So, you know, we have a lot of this is an awkward setting for this discussion. But when when we're able to talk about these cases openly, it's it's much easier for us. And believe me, if we could talk about the details and and the videos and that we would. And I know one comment about the city council not watching the video. Brian Pine actually explained or one of the commissioners city counselors did explain that they just they can't comment during city council. So they didn't respond that they had seen the video because it's not their nature and public comment to answer questions. So I'm not sure I would say that there were any city counselors at that meeting who didn't watch the videos just in fairness to them. Because I was at that same meeting and I heard the follow up later saying, you know, I didn't raise my hand because that's not what we do. So, just to speak generally about oversight, you know, we've the city council, many of you may know a year or so ago charged us to follow through with a new idea of trying to act as an oversight, if you will, to the police department. And, you know, as the last year that we've tried to figure out the best way to do that, you know, we're finding our own way with respect to that. What's evolved now, I think, is a very positive situation where you have seven citizens who before any discipline is issued. All right, in many cases, discipline gets issued and then there's some oversight at that point. But before any discipline is issued in this city, the chief will take us into executive session. A serious discipline will show us the evidence and will get the input of seven community members who are trying to do the right thing in this community. All right, and we only see what we see and sometimes new evidence comes out and people see other things. But based on what we see, we make the best decision we can around guiding this department to make its best decision. And I think with that structure, we do a pretty good job in helping the chief and this department to make good discipline decisions that are consistent. And, you know, if you look back to the record of prior disciplines and that takes into consideration the community and everything else, and we do the best that we can. Is it the best system for oversight? I think that's a question that is being raised now and was raised the other night with this new resolution that the city has created a task force to look at the whole concept of discipline and how this department operates in terms of oversight and what is the best arrangement. So, you know, there's an opportunity out there to take a look at how it works, how it worked here and how could it work better. And, you know, as that commission evolves, it's a, I think a six month charge to come back sometime in November with, you know, recommendations on how we can all do something better than we have in the past. And I think there's always room for improvement. But I think it's also important just to understand that for now at least these seven commissioners up here, citizens like yourselves, you know, do see the evidence. We do have an open and frank discussion about what is reasonable and appropriate and we give out the best advice we can. So, I mean, I don't know if that's any consolation to anyone, but that is how it works now. And we're going to have an opportunity to look to see whether that's the best way to do this, or whether there are other ways that that can be structured to be more responsive to the community. Chief? I'm going to jump in real quick, I thought there was going to be a comment on there. Right, I mean, I would not say that, you know, I think that we are doing things perfectly right now. I don't think that, in part because there are outcomes that happen that we collectively in the city doesn't want. So there are outcomes that we don't want to happen. It would be helpful, I think, if some more information could be given about what the process is starting from kind of when the commission becomes aware of incidents, when our input is solicited, what we can recommend, speaking during the office is not about any specifics, what we can recommend and how that gets facted into an ultimate disciplinary decision. I'm not sure that people know what that is right now, or how that works. And I think it would be actually good for you to know a little bit more about how that works. But I think that we can all do a better job, because I think that there are still outcomes throughout that we don't want. I know, so there were a lot of questions. I'm not going to get a chance to say anything about all the questions. I'm not going to try, so I apologize for that right now. But I do want to say a few quick things in light of this with some things that were said. So one was about looking at social workers versus police officers, for example, that was the first comment that was made. And also the second and last comment about how mental health workers have abilities in training and deescalating incidents. So again, and so this right now is my personal opinion, but I'm not speaking for commission. You know, I think that what we want, ideally of course, is for officers of BPD to have those skills, to have those deescalation skills. Whether they are kind of, whether you're hiring a social worker, or whether you're hiring someone who already has deescalation training, whether officers are trained in deescalation tactics, that's what we want to have happen. And I think that obviously not just mental health workers have those skills, although they do, high school teachers have those skills, they're trained in deescalating situations all the time. There are plenty of people in the community that kind of are trained in deescalation. And I think that officers are also trained in deescalation, but it might be that those policies and training and how that happens needs to be looked at again or updated. The goal of course is for any situation where a situation can be resolved without any force at all, that we should be finding ways to make that happen. And I think that anytime we have any tools available to us, we should be looking for that goal. So that's just to say that when we're offering our opinions about disciplinary matters, and like I said, I'll leave it to someone else to talk about how that happens from start to finish, but when we're looking at disciplinary matters, I do think that the goal is always how can we make sure that these situations are not happening in the future if they can be avoided? And then the question becomes, what's the way to do that? And sometimes that is a tricky question, sometimes a tricky answer. And sometimes those answers, when they get implemented, take a longer time to implement than just a kind of one second or one day or one week or one month kind of fix. And sometimes they take longer than that. But I do think that that is the goal. And so insofar as we're not getting to that goal yet or quickly enough, I am happy to apologize to the community for us not getting to that goal as quickly as we would like to do. But I do think that that's the goal. And so the question is just what are the means to get there? Okay. Next is Chief's report. Thank you. If you don't mind, I'll take an opportunity to address some of the questions. That would be great, Chief. Thank you. Thank you. So thanks for answering those questions. I think they were incisive. I'll try to hit on a few of them. There were some that I will invariably miss. I was writing as I went. Every police officer in the city of Burlington is issued a body camera. Any officer on patrol or conducting enforcement operations or conducting an investigation is expected to wear the body camera and activated during any substantive interaction with the public. So if you have an interview, you know, a call for service, an attempted arrest, if you come up and ask them for directions, they're probably not going to activate it. It does capture not with audio but with video, the 30 seconds prior. So if something is developing and they hit it all of a sudden, as you've seen on the videos you've watched online, I'm sure it captures the prior 30 seconds as well. So it's a safeguard to capture that information. It's worth noting, for example, that in the cases of force that made the news that they were captured on our body cameras and they were turned over to defense attorneys, as well as prosecutors. So they're, and in both cases, although in, for example, the case with maybe your jock, it was the officer that took the, that made the arrest and other people came on a few minutes afterwards. But there's often more than one body camera at work. So beyond that, you also have folks filming things, which we encourage that your First Amendment write. And like I said, even if you look at the unfortunate shooting of Phil Grenin, for example, that was captured on several different body cameras. So we have 100% saturation and our policy for body camera use is online. You can peruse it. But again, they're expected to be used in every substantive encounter with a citizen, all substantive police work. And the officers cannot edit or delete their body camera footage. And once they dock it, it's downloaded. And then it's only supervisors can edit or delete, but they may not. That's against regulation. And it's turned over, like I said, not only to prosecutors but to defense attorneys. As far as the distribution of body camera footage, there's a Supreme Court case in Vermont that we're expecting a decision on. That will talk about the fees that can or can't be charged. One of the reasons why the city has an interest in that is because it's, that decision not only applies to body camera footage, but all documents. And we've had people, I mean, for example, not just whatever your political affiliation is. People on the right, people on the left have made very, very, very voluminous fishing expedition public records requests of us. Sometimes to gather information to use in a political nature. And the city wants to understand how the Supreme Court's going to rule about our ability to charge for that. So before we have to supply, for example, a pro-NRA advocacy group with everything the city's ever said about gun control, for example. We should get some feedback on that soon. But in general, and I stress this, I'm for notwithstanding the outcome of this decision, the timely release of body camera footage. I think that if you look at cities like Seattle, cities like New York or DC, for example, it's up to the discretion of city government to release the footage and it often gets released very quickly. Here, for example, if you look at our prosecutors, in this case, Sarah George, T.J. Donovan, their precedent has been unremittingly to withhold body camera footage until they've made a charging decision. I don't always agree with that and we'll see how that pans out. As far as the use of verbal commands, I think, so right now, these cases are being litigated. But I will say, I did a 25 minute press conference where I acknowledged that there is a requirement to use verbal commands, if safe to do so, in our policy. And I said a lot about that at the time. It's still up on the Bruins and Police Department Facebook page. And I spoke and alluded to, either in some certain and some illusory terms, to how I feel about those cases and about the use of verbal commands. And how I felt, at least in one case, for certain, was the basis of discipline. So that is a valid point that you made and I won't contest it. In fact, in great substance, I agree with it. As far as Mr. Waters, if you recall, I wasn't upset that you, I said as much. I wasn't upset you interrupted me. I was more concerned that what you said was a factual error. You said that our crisis intervention truck has a grenade launcher on it. That shoots foam darts. It's less than lethal device. So I went back and I checked. I said, maybe you know something I don't. Maybe they opened up one of the hatches and you were filming something. I said, do we own anything that explodes or irritates or has any sort of like a chemical weapon or pepper spray or tear gas or an explosive that's fired out of that? And the answer is unequivocally no. So please feel free to interrupt me. I just prefer that the, like, I mean, we can contest the facts. I'm less likely to take umbrage at facts that I believe are true when I get interrupted. As far as the policing of protests go, I'm assuming you're talking about the speak out that was on church street. So I understand why you feel that having a few police officers present may have a chilling effect of some sort. A lot of people feel that way. We take seriously two things. One is the absolute need to protect and facilitate protests. You may not take that at face value. I don't take Charlottesville, Virginia at face value. I don't think that extremists won't come to a protest in Burlington and take their umbrage out at the far right or the far left or anything like that. I felt that if a protest happens and anyone gets hurt, someone could just walk up to a protestor and sucker punch them, for example, let alone drive a car or shoot into the crowd. I'd feel like we haven't done our job as a police department. If we haven't, you know, police protest, what I'm not going to do is put plain clothes officers into a protest. I think that's deceitful. So what we do do is put a small number of uniformed officers around a protest. People who tend to be more aligned with us, and I don't just mean politically, but it wasn't an issue, for example, when we had the Pulse Nightclub rally and speak out on the other side of City Hall Park. People, it's a different theme, but people weren't upset at the protection. In fact, they liked it. I'm sorry if you felt like it was unwelcome. But the other thing is where you decide to do a march, what we have a history of is especially with police brutality. And we discussed this. If you're alleging criticism of the police department, and you decide to do a march, I'm inclined whether you have a permit or not to facilitate that march rather than make an arrest. And we did something very similar to that, for example, Black Lives Matter up at UVM. If you're going to start marching into the street, for example, and shutting down Main Street, like we need police officers there to facilitate that. So if you'd ever like to make sure that you're having a protest and you want to make sure that police are... I'm going to insist that if at all possible, police are there to make sure it's safe. But if you want to make sure that it has an impact, that it doesn't feel like it's chilling, I'd be happy to work that out in advance so that we can come to a consensus or compromise about that. Mr. Hughes, as far as Bennington goes, I mean, I share your frustrations with the prosecution, or lack there are, I assume you're talking about Kia Morris. If you're talking about prosecution, as you know, we have made hate crime prosecutions in this city that sometimes have been, number one, overturned. And sometimes that actually the ACLU has come out against and said, you guys two vigorously prosecute hate crimes and we're going to fight to free the defendant. So if you're talking about our willingness to tackle difficult racial issues, the proof lies in the prosecution, as I've said, of a person who distributed KKK flyers to people of color, the prosecution of Christopher Hayden. We opened up a hate crime investigation into the burning of the pride flag on Bright Street. If you read the comment section, they're saying, you just, they criticize us for that. I don't take that seriously. I think we're doing the right thing. In the case of the children with the boss, the key thing you said was prosecution. Prosecution is a joint decision between myself and the state's attorney. As you know, the state's attorney is clear that she does not bring cases that she doesn't think she could win in good faith. I have been in discussions with her about the feasibility of a case here. I don't have an answer for you, but I will check back and give you an update. As far as people with mental health backgrounds in going into policing, I completely agree that that's the type of people that we'd actually want to be police officers who have experience working with people in crisis and experience in de-escalation, who are joining the police department not for like a misplaced sense of adventure, but because they have a sense of dealing with these at-risk communities and they're willing to help. Mostly with the Howard Center, I have the privilege of being on the board. I remind Bob Dick that the police department, you may disagree with this in spirit, but it pays better than the Howard Center. So if anybody wants to join the police department with the crisis intervention background in mental health, I'd love to have them apply. I just want to see if I'm missing one or two other things. No, I mean, I guess that's all that I see here. I'm probably... No, I think another thing too that I want to be candid about is I don't agree. I'm not satisfied with the timeline at which we release the information about these two use of force incidents because number one, we didn't decide to release them, right? They were released by the plaintiff. The plaintiff got the body camera footage. The plaintiff's attorney wrote a civil complaint and released it. We felt we were looking at these issues at least going as far back as October to November. So that's when I got back to work after being out with my injuries. And we had many, many, many sessions where we're saying this is something that needs to be released quickly because it's going to look like we were withholding if we didn't, but we knew that the day was coming and we knew that these were disturbing images and we knew that we'd have to account for them. And one of the things that I hope that really comes from the task force and the committee that's being formed is an understanding about when to release these massive, high-impact personnel matters that will have an effect on public trust that deviates from the city's present personnel policies because the city's present policies are unequivocal about the fact that personnel matters are quiet, they're confidential, and even after they're resolved, they don't normally get advertised. I don't agree with that. And to my relief, even our union said, oh, listen, we need to release these things sooner. So if there's one or two things, I guess, that I'd, for certain, that I'd like to come, one, just hitting on a few things, I think it will be cheaper, easier, and quicker to redact body camera footage than ever before. I think it gets cheaper every day. I think that we can tend towards more timely releases. Somebody asked about the stuff that was put on Reddit, not Reddit, it made it right on to Reddit, put out and taken down. That was body camera footage that was being prepared for a transmittal to a family member of a person who'd asked for it. The press has since inquired about it. I assume that that footage will now become a matter of public discussion soon, but that was actually put up very, very briefly in error. That was a complete clerical error in our part. That was supposed to be transmitted to somebody who was involved in that incident. So better release of footage, number one, cheaper, faster, maybe telling prosecutors that in high stakes incidents, it's better to get the footage out there rather than wait months to put it out. I would prefer if the Douglas Kilburn footage was out in public right now, to everybody. Number two, I think it would be great to have a better expectation of when we can deviate from present personnel precedent in order to release these notifications and footage about high impact incidents. And number three, I think it would be great to come up with an apparatus by which it's not an additional duty for the police department to investigate things like civilian complaints and also see if we ought to hire out investigators to have a more permanent investigatory apparatus that specializes in it, that maybe works in our collective direction, maybe reports to me on a daily basis but then answers to the police commission. So I think there's a lot of good opportunities with this committee to bring more speed and transparency and fairness to the disciplinary process. So that's kind of a snap. There was a lot of different things that were brought up in these comments, but that's where we're at with most of them. Thank you. Oh, chief's update. So not in any sort of order of importance, but by way of good news, we had five graduates just graduate from the police academy. We had a six. We had a foreign-born Sri Lankan New Yorker who came up here to be a police officer. He chose Vermont because it was one of the few... We were one of the few jurisdictions that will hire permanent residents rather than U.S. citizens. I think it's fantastic. My father was drafted into the Army before he was a citizen and served this country in uniform. I think if you're willing to make the commitment, we are to take you. So we get permanent residents who apply to us, and he applied to us because he couldn't get the job in New York. I was very pleased to have him. After a few weeks at the police academy, he decided that the Vermont police scene wasn't for him. So we lost one of our graduates. However, we do have five other graduates. They are two women, three men, one Asian, two Hispanics. So, you know, I think that's a good class as far as diversity goes. I think we're always striving to recruit a diverse class as possible. However, we suffer from the same challenges that Vermont suffers when it comes to encouraging people to pick up a life somewhere else where they're more comfortable, perhaps, move to Vermont, and join, of all things, the police department, which is a very challenging profession for anybody relocating here. We will be sometime in the next few weeks to months, depending on our schedule, because we have the same person doing most of this, the same two people, which is Nancy Stetson, our analyst at Eric Radivill, be releasing our first look at car stop data, as well as the raw data I'm pointing to Professor Saguino, who has an acute interest in that. We will also be releasing use of force data. One thing to clarify, it's come out in the City Council more than once that someone has said it's your legally, we are legally obligated to collect car stop race data and analyze it, and also hand it over to the government and to the public. Someone said, I think it was Max Tracy, he said in an error, it was an advert, and he said, you're legally required to collect use of force data, why aren't you releasing it? We're not, actually. There's no law in Vermont that requires a collection of use of force data. We do it, the state police do it, other agencies do it. I'm not saying it's not a legal requirement, so, you know, ha ha, I'm saying that it is something that's superrogatory. There are many things we do. We've been collecting it since 2012 when we started a program, literally a computer program to do it. We released 2012 to 2016, and an analysis all at once. I know you were citing a bit of that yesterday, I believe, Professor Ciguino. We will be looking at 17 and 18 in short order, and we will be releasing the raw data. There's just one other thing to say, but we have notification. In the last two years, there were two very notable homicides that a decision was made on today. One was Aida Garong hacked his wife's head open and killed her in public on Hyde Street about a year and change ago if the date is correct. We were able, although he was, you know, menacing folks with that cleaver and although he'd injured his victims, mother-in-law, we were able to take him into custody. He was charged with murder, stabbed somebody in the throat, and killed him on Church Street in the middle of the day as well. So both of these folks had defense attorneys who pled insanity. Today, the state's attorney has notified the public that she will not be prosecuting these cases, and all the charges against these individuals are dismissed. So by way of public notification, we are advocating that before anybody contemplates returning either Mr. Forte or Aida Garong to the community that they received the psychiatric evaluation that hopefully will leave them institutionalized until there can be absolutely no doubt that they're not a threat to others or the public. What we have here are two crimes, one with the cleaver, one with the knife that resulted in homicides. And again, to reiterate, both of these incidents will not be prosecuted by the state's attorney because she feels the case cannot be made by reason of insanity. We have a lot of proceedings at the Department of Mental Health to see if these people will remain institutionalized or if they'll be returned to the public. But I did want to let folks know, and I guess it's also saying that we have a very, very robust mental health apparatus in our community. Both of these individuals were mental health patients in our community, both at the hospital and the Howard Center. The Howard Center's budget is about $110 million for its services, which are all high-need services. The hospital and the Community Health Center of Burlington, their psychiatric and mental health budgets run into the millions. They vastly outpace our budget and the mass of their social workers vastly outpaces our staffing as police officers. But we do respond to mental health crises that oftentimes candidly mental health workers are either unable to safely respond to or just can't. Not only should we ensure that the community is not in danger by Mr. Gurong or Mr. Fortier if we talk about whether they should be institutionalized or released, but a lot of times mental health crises come to a violent conclusion that requires the intervention of the police and sometimes requires force. And I think that these decline prosecutions are a reminder of the fact that crime and mental health are different, but they can both be violent and sometimes different than a mental health crisis response. So thank you. Do any commissioners have any questions for Chief Delpozzo? Next on the agenda, update on proposed, which is not proposed, it's actually we can do an update on the task force regarding use of force and really looking at Burlington policing. It was approved last night and what I need to do according to the resolution commissioners is approach to people who are interested in serving on this task force. It will be a commitment. It was sent out for you guys to take a look at and read and I guess my question is is anybody any commissioners feel inspired to be part of that task force? I need to point to. Should we give us some time? I'd be interested. And Randall? Yes. Anybody else want to be considered? No? Okay. Did you have a question? No. That's good. Okay. So what I'll do is I'll put forth both of your names to City Council. Okay. You know, we have been thinking about how what would the role of the Police Commission be while the task force is going, you know, is happening. And I think one of the things that I envision, and if anyone else has any other thoughts, is that the two of you would be part of the task force and would give agenda items for us to consider and give you input as commissioners to bring back to the task force and for you to keep that in mind. Does that make sense? Does anybody have any thoughts about that? Okay. The next is arraignment data. Laura, are we able to get this working? Should we move our seats? If not, we'll be making bunnies. So I guess by way of introduction and maybe to buy, are you ready to go with that or is it, okay, the wheel spinning? We have to do that. Yeah, sure. So maybe to buy the audio video squad. Maybe to buy folks some time. One of the things that we mentioned we would be doing in the coming weeks was talking about our collection of arraignment data. I didn't want it, listen, there's a lot more pressing stuff to get out in public over the last few weeks and they didn't want it to just get lost in the shuffle, but I think this is 20 months and I'm actually glad that there's an audience of civic minded and justice minded people here to at least look at the report. We're posting it up and will also be releasing the raw data for other folks to use in the coming days. I know just looking at Liam Connors we've spoken about this report. It's very gracious of you not to just constantly foyer our work in progress, but now you can just get the entire dataset right now. Yep, you got it. We realize that, you know, we're required for example to collect car stop, race data, we do collect obviously our arrest data, we collect the demographics about it, we know who we're charging, you know, with various crimes. We know what we bring to the prosecutor and then we know to some extent, and I know that Mark Hughes gave me a cock-eyed look when I, Mark you here, or is it like he gave me a cock-eyed look when I said we were in prison for the most part and he said well maybe we kind of do but we're not exactly sure, but there's also the judicial process has a big impact on criminal justice just the spirit of criminal justice and the disparate impacts by race and class, and we realize that there was not a systemic way to look at what happened after we made our arrest and to see for example what happened just to begin with an arraignment. So we have a woman who is a victim's child and so what we did was we started systematically using her presence to collect data. I know you'll be able to talk about the, do I need to buy more time, the types of data, but what we ended up doing in any case was over the last 20 months we kept on refreshing the report but we took comprehensive data from the last 1,000, I guess at this point 1,787 Burlington Arraignment. So every time we leveled charges and every time there was a subsequent arraignment we had somebody at court we may have missed a few but we had basically 1,800 incidents we collected the age of the defendant, the gender of the defendant, the race of the defendant, the charge the judge, whether the person showed up or the bail was set, how much was set, whether a warrant was issued, what the incident number was, and maybe even a few other cases that we were missing and then we looked at some, we ran it through some statistical batteries so looks like PowerPoint is not responding. There we go. So that having been said, Nancy Stetson is our crime and data analyst, Nancy comes to us originally from Vermont but educated by way of Berkeley out on the west coast in public policy or public administration? Public policy. So she is author of this report and I wanted to give her the opportunity to present some of it. Just as long as folks can hear you I think that's fine. From the courts because we had someone sitting just started collecting who was arraigned and how much bail they got so this covered 20 months, there were over a thousand defendants and like the chief said around 1,800 cases, a little less than a third of those cases were there was a charge that included a so what we found was that of all the cases around a fifth of them actually received some bail bail was generally put in loan and you can see the chart just shows the frequency of the amount of bail that was given. Yeah folks can see the well I don't know what to say but maybe you can highlight some of them. Well so the highest mark there is $20,000 there were two over the period there are two people that received bails of $1,000,000 but that was quite rare and outlier I felt but for the most part bails were under $5,000 and most were under $500 $500 is the median bail. We also found that a number of defendants did not show for their bail hearings around one out of every five defendants that were called to arraignment were not actually present for it and so then the judge either issued a bench warrant or that's an arrest warrant that's also possible in that case so that was surprising to me. So one of the things that courts do or suggest you know sometimes defense attorneys but sometimes cities it's at different levels but they either give a phone reminder or email reminder a text reminder about showing up to your bail or arraignment hearing in order to reduce the incidence of people not appearing not appearing will either get you bail and or warrant so it has cascading effects on people's lives and we found that in Chittenden County for our cases like I said 20% of all people for arraignment just never show up. And also there were a number of defendants who were arraigned multiple times in this period. One defendant was arraigned 15 times over that 20 month period that was the most of any defendant but you can see that the judges did see the same defendants repeatedly after they had the bulk of their work. So like the chief said we did look at the demographics of bail you can see that men and women were given about the same amount of bail but women were slightly less likely to receive any bail but bail is closely whether someone receives bail it's closely correlated with whether they're like how severe the charge was so felony cases were more likely to receive bail than the rest of the intercases so that is connected and as far as grace goes we found that African American defendants were more likely to receive bail and also had higher bail set but both of those results did not hold when you controlled for the severity of the charge that they had. We also wanted to look at whether judges assigned bail differently because judges have a fairly wide latitude on whether they need to assign bail and how much bail actually put on I was actually surprised that you didn't find a bigger difference between them as you can see there's some variation this only includes judges with at least 20 cases over this time period and they all assigned bail in about one out of every four or one out of every five cases this analysis also looked at whether the bail reform law that went into effect last July had an effect on the level of bail set so the bail reform had a number of pieces the part I'm going to focus on is the cap on bail so the act said that judges can only assign bail for $200 for any charge that is a misdemeanor that is expungible which are generally just nonviolent low level offenses and what I found was that the the law seemed to work in those cases that the bail was limited to $200 for low level misdemeanors but it didn't have a wider effect or at least a large, wider effect on other types of offenses it didn't seem to bring down less bail to be assigned for more severe cases and this chart shows that same distribution so the red box are the more severe cases and the blue are these expungible misdemeanor cases you can see how bail was limited the average bail went down but not so much for the more severe cases actually both are all right so you know one of the things that's important to stress I guess there's a few things and if you have any questions we'll be happy to take them but there doesn't exist a data set like this anywhere else in Vermont but we thought it was important to construct one just to see the next step in the criminal justice system it would be interesting to look at the effects of plea bargaining it would be interesting to look at the effects of sentencing we don't have as much insight into those things because we're not usually physically present in the courtroom for that stuff but what this shows us if you're interested in cash bail reform this data set will enable you to look at the trends in cash bail the effects of cash bail how much cash bail is set if you're interested in looking at individual judge behavior that we do would anonymize the judges you can tease that apart if you get your hands on the data set we also like looked at whether somebody shows up to court or not I think if you're looking at a negative effect about the issuance of a warrant or the issuance of conditions if one in five people don't show up to court that pretty much always follows with a sanction of some sort so you can increase just the simple presence of people the court judges are then disinclined subsequently you bail usually likely to let people continue to appear on their own court so any system that helps get that extra 20% to the courtroom will probably reduce negative impacts in the arraignment process and I know there's you did a regression analysis but I don't know if you have any insight or just skip it I spoke to it a little bit just that neither race nor gender are you controlled for the severity of the charge of the point so anyway that said this report will be published online the report has already been sent to the county judges and the raw data set will be online as well so if you are a professor or a student or just curious and you want this data set it will be there for you and it's a very robust set it's got 1,800 cases and each of them has how many columns would you say well I mean like 10 10 columns 1,800 cases so it's a lot of data so please go ahead I just take exception to the idea that $500 bail is not high given the population of people that I've worked with increased the validity of what you're looking at if you also look at household income and class status but the fact that a lot of people feel very targeted by the police based on class as well as race and I don't think you can really exclude that and I think that in my experience the people that have police involvement and a lot of time they can't make it to those hearings because of factors related to their economic status like not having transportation and I think that those factors can serve you greatly to sustain the justice and you can be very close to it yeah that's fair and also part of that act that went into effect on summer requires judges to assess a defendant's financial ability right so to reiterate these are the judges setting the bail and if you feel you know the $500 is too high which you know will be for many people I mean at the whole point of our data collection is to show exactly in 1800 cases how much bail was issued for what type of charge to whom and by what amount I don't think we could get income data for the individual defendants but you know this data sets out there for somebody to take it and make the case for example that the bail is too high even after the bail reform act and it also speaks to the incentives of getting people to court please yeah I mean you know one of the things that I foresaw is exactly that question like why what I'd be interested in is you know what separates I mean certain cases are plainly always going to be a felony if you're accused of a robbery that's a felony right but there are cases where there's the same type of crime can be described by a misdemeanor or a felony so I think the more interesting question is are our officers fairly choosing to charge felony assault versus misdemeanor assault are they fairly choosing to charge like the felony version of a few different types of crimes rather than misdemeanors and then there's a larger question of like what direction officers attention towards a particular person or a particular neighborhood and so that's like I'm acknowledging that right we can get into like a very deep conversation about that now I would say that if somebody says that person robbed me and we do believe that that's true they are going to get charged with a felony if someone says I was burglarized and we find a fingerprint or a piece of DNA on a you know a window and it comes back to a person that person will be charged with felony burglary right but there are cases where an officer can give a warning or charge something like disorderly conduct there are cases where order officers can charge disorderly conduct or assault misdemeanor assault or felony assault and I think they're kind of just trying to refine your question and it would be interesting to look at our arrest data and see what trends prevail there well we've put our I mean part of it will probably be looking at our use of force data will lead us towards questions like that as well right yes no that's a great point I don't know if there's any people I mean I made plenty of arrests but there we have folks in the room who are fresh off the the street I don't know if you want to explain the arrest and charging process you can identify yourself with some control intent that is determined whether or not you want to proceed but at that point they can either dismiss or if they feel that there's other factors or evidence that would lead them to charge a different criminal offense they can also do that they can send a case back to a criminal investigation as well or they can also combine some of the cases that they currently have if there is someone who is a multiple offender who has current cases pending hopefully that's again not to simplify but that is basically the general steps in the process of getting a citation to court so the prosecutor will I mean I know Deputy Chief Meera to talk about this they will make charging decisions that really depart from the officer's estimate sometimes I don't know if you want to share any of that insight but they do it's not just the officer does not decide unilaterally what goes on in arraignment right they supply the evidence that the attorney makes a charge of the defendant we do we have instances of public disorder where officers are able to articulate incidents in which the public is put in alarm and we will have disagreements with our partners in the state's attorney's office about whether or not that alarm rose to certain levels an incident in which a man was walking through church street and the farmer's market with a knife in his hand and reading and shouting unintelligible things even beating over a baby carriage at one point with that knife and shouting and that was held not to be disorderly conduct although an arrest was made for disorderly conduct there are times where charges will be minimized or will be as the lieutenant said rolled into cases where we have instances in which a person is arrested that individual has so many other cases ongoing that the state's attorney will say we're not going to move forward with these charges because there are so many others already on the table against this individual so there are a lot of different outcomes that can happen at the arraignment stage so one of the things I say unequivocally we don't track and analyze officer arrest quantity it will take an occasional like one over the world look and we'll publish arrests basically as metadata police department every month I had to give a list to my supervisors of how many arrests I made felony misdemeanor how many tickets I wrote and you know they knew anyway because it was all in the system but they wanted to consolidate it for me too I know deputy chief mirad came from the same police department here we don't do that so it's important to stress that there's not like a tally sheet that we're looking at officers are incentivized to upcharge to a felony because they get more you know credit for it or something like that I mean I'm looking at Eric is a police corporal here you could probably attest to that as well yeah and people talk about quotas I don't know if I mean too much I mean I mean I mean positive in fact they were really in a career they're more motivated in certain aspects of policing and we tend to take assignments areas that were of higher crime value higher accuracy of people who tend to be more active more interaction so you tend to see officers they have some skewed numbers that way quotas in some of who is working a day time shift in the summertime where it's less busy because of the dynamics of that area so you do see some skewed numbers of that we're going to look at it that way when I was evaluating teams it's a sardine to a noun but I look at the totality of our patrol districts and what our people are doing on crime prevention we do tend to see we're not focusing on the number of instance officers responding to or rest of them presenting it's more about the quality of the investigations and the effect it has on the totality of the community like I said just putting out numbers to give numbers there's no value in that it's not going to depend on the necessity or done without a purpose we have a number of officers currently stationed on foot regular foot patrol in the lower church street area in the vicinity of city hall park and if they could work the entire summer without writing a single ticket or making a single arrest to dissuade the disorder that I think everybody knows has sometimes been apparent in city hall park or in some of those other areas that would be great it's not always the case the city council gave new criminal tickets created into criminal tickets to be used for individuals whose encounters with civil tickets have not dissuaded them from continued disorderly behavior of life but if there were abilities to make all of that be addressed and corrected via near presence that would be great there's no need for the department to push for those kinds of metrics they push for a week or I push for outcomes I think I just wanted to close with unless anyone has any questions sure just one oh please go ahead I was going to ask questions about the actual data and what it meant to you sure please go ahead I'm sorry I had a question so I just noticed at one point in the data it does say about 25% of cases are felonies is that some of that right? not all felonies are violent if not all incidents involve violence and certainly not all involve guns and certainly not all involved weapons just trying to bring the conversation back as people showed up tonight why can't the percentage of officers versus social workers reflect the actual percentage of incidents that involve violence and involve weapons and involve a need for an actual armed officer so that's a good question and I think that it would be helpful to talk about what it takes to staff a police department and make sure that it's well equipped and well trained we have something like 98 officers right now we have school resource officers we have detectives we have an narcotics unit we have patrol officers we have two community affairs officers we have a policy analyst we have a domestic violence officer that just deals with domestic violence when you look at our ability to deploy officers out on the street it's not like we're just overflowing with officers you'd be surprised to know Saturday night or even like a Wednesday night there may be six officers working in the entire city so it's not necessarily like we're totally flush with officers and we have to balance it but we do need if a critical incident happens if somebody is shot on North Willard Street like I can't just materialize I need 8, 10 a dozen officers to secure crime scenes start doing a city wide canvas for the suspect to take victims to the hospital and you know those officers need to be armed so one of the things we can't do is just assume and God forbid there's ever something like a school shooting or a critical incident or even just successfully managing the spontaneous Black Lives Matter protest up on Main Street just to shut down Main Street that way took 8 or 10 officers so we don't always say that we need the maximum amount of officers in every sort of horrible crisis but I don't think that we're over staffed right now I just think that we're basically staffed and so where you and I might differ is in not in the need to have more of a like social work capacity here but I don't believe in the zero sum of it coming out of my officer headcount we might just disagree about that we also send 9 officers to the FAA requires that we staff the airport in order for it to run so about 10% of our police department just polices the airport that's another thank you John that's another point too and I would like police officers to be as well trained as possible in de-escalation and in social work type skills you may argue they'll never do it as well as a social worker I might agree social workers will never police as well as cops right and I think you know we can talk about resource allocation but we're not like just falling over with excess cops right now so thank you for that question Commissioner Simpson you had a it sounds to me from if you have one out of five people not showing up for arraignment and you have 339 multiple arraignments and one person arraigned 15 times I think people should know that that's not good and that's a at least from my perspective as a breakdown in the system and it's not attributable to the police department it's attributable to the courts or the state's attorney's office and so I wondered first of all do you think that have you spoken to anyone to see whether one in five is the people at the court system for instance considered or the state's attorney considered that acceptable yeah so one of the things so I mean listen that's a great you would not be surprised that the chief of police says that people not showing up to court is a bad thing I didn't want to just say like that's hey shocker like newsflash the chief thinks everybody should show up to court but I did want to put that out there for people to consider but be a little bit agnostic about what that might indicate people can draw their own conclusions but I will say this it's not 20% of the people not showing up is in my opinion it's disruptive to the judge it's disruptive to the defense attorneys and it's disruptive to the prosecutors it's like literally 20% false starts and so I think that there are consequences to people not showing up not just only for the negative downstream effects of a warrant or subsequent bail but for the efficiency of the court system their ability to do their job I don't know how that compares to other places in Vermont I know that that is in you know in big cities arraignment is upon arrest so you are physically transported to arraignment so there's unless you're a desk appearance ticket you're pretty much always getting brought there here we give people time we're more lenient about that and it does have this 20% no show rate I think if the public wants to weigh in on that or the court wants to weigh in on that they ought to they'll take it from the don't be surprised that the police think that that's too high of an absentee rate but I think that's a no I think that's a good point there's one other point I was going to make and it's going to come to me the second I basically agrees with what you're saying with respect to the multiple arraignments and the person being arraigned 15 times that's got to be a problem with either who sets the conditions of release or whether the state's attorney is asking for appropriate conditions of release including cash bail well one of the things I was going to say is that one of our biggest arrests is for violating conditions of release so conditions of release from Lua Bail you get sent to go on your own devices but you may have you know if there's a domestic violence incident or you can't go near this person you're accused of hurt you have to stay abide by a curfew you can't appear in certain places because you've stolen from them or something and violating those conditions is I see some of the patrol officers nodding is one of the number one things we arrest people for and if we have a minute I know that deputy chief has an interesting story to tell about that how that has a public safety and resource impact the idea of violating conditions of release and arrests for those is important it imparts consequence to the justice system's ability to tell someone that we are going to let you be released we're not going to be as intrusive or as we could be and to lodge you it saves resources but it requires that somebody abide by certain conditions can be had in our instances where even that doesn't pay two very vicious felony assaults in battery part just outside the door the first involved two men beating an individual into unconsciousness such that he had to be intubated at the hospital and we made an arrest of one of those individuals at the scene and an arrest of another individual for disorderly conduct upon further investigation we determined that the first individual had not been the primary physical aggressor and that the individual we had arrested for disorderly conduct in fact been the primary physical aggressor and the real author of the beating but by that time he'd been released because our preference for small time excuse me for lesser level citations such as disorderly conduct is to release from the facility he was out he and his friend then went and assaulted someone else in battery park within a few hours they took an individual they believed to have been a witness against them although that was not in fact the case and they slashed him slashed him with a knife to the tune of 27 sutures and one of the other individuals kicked him in the head a few times we arrested both of them the next day one of them is still in jail he's the one who is alleged to have wielded a knife the other was giving conditions of release most conditions of release included a curfew included rules not to re-engage with the person he was alleged to have assaulted either of the two individuals and required him to stay at a residence in Williston that he listed as his residence we encountered him again a few nights ago in City Hall Park after that curfew we brought him back here we were told by a judge to release him although the second he walked out of the door he would have been again in violation of that curfew and so the judge said well you will have to address that we arranged to transport him back to the residence that he claimed in Williston only to find that he in fact had trespassed from that residence to the assaults that had happened and therefore prior to telling the court that that was a valid residence for him he perjured himself upon telling the judge that he had perjured himself and was in violation of his condition of release for curfew the judge said void that condition let him out so we did what percentage of arrest I don't know that we have a percentage on that we don't have entirely accurate data it's self-reported as to whether or not sometimes we have individuals who are between homes sometimes we have individuals who are basically out of doors by choice there are people who have residences to which they can go, residences that are provided by the city or subsidized by various entities nonprofits, governments and yet choose to be in the open but we don't have real data on it it's possible you know we have there's a transient or undomiciled indication on the arrest report so that's information we can get for you that's information that it's probably not available online but I would make the distinction more so a lot of our transactions with homeless individuals are about either severe intoxication or mental illness rather than an arrest for a crime per se I think that's the number one transaction we'd have I don't know I'd see some patrol cops in the back to make sure that that sounds right but yeah so we do have a lot of contact with the homeless it tends to be again the nexus is mental illness and intoxication Commissioner Harp did you have a question? Yes I have a question about the bailed data so bailed decisions are going to implicate lots of different levels of criminal justice system I'm wondering and I appreciate gathering this information making it available I'm wondering in what ways do you see it affecting BPD's policies of decision making this that's a great question and I don't know but one of the things that I feel we have an obligation to is like to provide this complete picture of criminal justice from our initial response to downstream the disposition of the case and the time someone spends in jail and so I think it's interesting like so I have to say it is instructive to me that 20% of the people we arrest just don't show up for arraignments like that's something I'd like to talk to the court about and not to say like you need to drop the hammer on them like somehow get them to arraignments right I mean I think that would be more efficient but also I think one of the things that's interesting is anecdotally I'll be honest my cops were like saying two things that there's a wide variation in judges habits and they also said like gosh dang no one ever gets bail but we could say now like no in fact some states have gone totally away from cash bail some states have gone to very very minimal cash bail but whether my cops want to hear it or not like 20% of the people get bail you can argue about the so I'm just looking to this is one poor cop standing in the back but you can say it's not enough or I don't think it's fair but I can't tell my officers that that is a fact that one in five people will get bail and we can't say that the variation between judges is not as as wide as people anecdotally thought it was so it lets our officers know there is there is consistency where they thought there may not have been also can you advocate for this information being collected somewhere other than just kind of assigning someone to kind of sit in the courtroom and collect it or is that going to be a kind of stable way of getting this down in the future or is there another way to that's a great question I think right now we have this big data set we have it because we capitalize on the fact that we're there every day we have an interest in it you know I think that if we're interested in like beginning to end look at criminal justice like someone should be collecting this data and not just we do it for not just for our arrest either I mean it's not a huge hall to make this data available in public and then to look into plea bargaining and into sentencing subsequent hearings have you had any contacts with them about either standardizing that information or getting access to it so I think those conversations we had before Nancy our data analyst Eric Fowler I've worked closely with them initially to try to have that happen on their side because obviously within the more efficient way to do it and it seemed and I could be speaking I remember it correctly but I believe the issue was that their data system just wasn't nimble in a way that they could do that and it could be that they are thinking about new data record management systems hopefully that would happen because I think it is an old system that they were using so this is 20 months now we've been doing this okay yeah so if you look at I'm sorry Eric oh yeah please I actually work in the court and we use a 1983 system that really doesn't have to have the data it's very minimal stuff it's it's not it's really really legal but some wrote next year and in any case we have a system that should have a lot more information hopefully that will change is your name Zachary by any chance hey nice to meet you see them on twitter thanks no listen that's a good and so interestingly if you look at Barry Stuntz as a legal scholar before he died of brain cancer he wrote the collapse of American criminal justice and he said that even more so you know police decide who to bring to the court by collecting evidence of people bringing them to the judge it is the behavior of the court system and prosecutors and defense attorneys that have probably the most lasting outcome on a person's like subsequent interactions and like life course and criminal justice and then he specifically went into plea bargaining as plea bargaining is the number one determinant of somebody's sort of fate as whether they end up in their huge disparities by race and by class but you know because if you have a high case load and your defense attorney is a public defender and you have a lot of people to get off your docket and you know you could just plead them out wealthy people that have private defense attorneys are less likely to plea bargain race and class are closely implicated so I think one of the interesting things would be someone where to collect this data would be to see throughout Vermont because we have pretty progressive prosecutors here statewide like what role plea bargaining plays in the pipeline and you can google this France just passed a law that you are not allowed to collect data about what judges do or analyze the decisions they make using data in France France so serious so there you have it so I don't know not France thank goodness okay thank you chief thanks for the update next on the agenda is update on the role of commission for citizen complaints this is just to remind the commissioners this is part of the pilot that we have been working on we brought the our revised document before public safety and they asked us to make a couple of changes and I don't know I know that you were working on some yes so I was possibly going to revise it this last month but in looking at it further it looks like it should just stay the way it is in talking with the city attorney so the last draft that came I don't know if folks had looked at it for last meeting but that's the one still on the table that was the one that we had voted on what I don't know is we'll bring it before public safety because we need to do that but in light of this new task force the whole thing could be revised so but we'll bring it to public safety just so that they have it and we can give it to the new task force that's being formed so they can check it out okay any other commissioners updates or comments anybody has I just have a question I understand that some people on city council were concerned about they had access to disciplinary decisions and body cam footage and things like that and so I was wondering whether there was a way of apprising city councilers earlier or even more broadly about matters that the commission was looking at or matters that that BPD was looking at as far as possible disciplinary actions I support that idea I think if commissioners one of the tensions is commissioners who are hesitant to take the information in executive session or take it and hold it confidential there comes a point where excuse me you guys do hold stuff in executive session if it's something that is clearly going to have a high impact in the community and it's going to be newsworthy and that people need to hear about I support releasing that stuff as soon as we get our footing on it if it's something that's an ongoing investigation especially of a serious but internal matter for example or something that doesn't merit immediate public disclosure I do support briefing the council but in that there is an element of confidentiality to it right same thing with the view considering serious discipline against the electric company so employee so if folks are and you know it wasn't comforting to see the council feel like they were caught in the headlights when those two lawsuits came out it seemed like it would have been an easy matter to tell them this thing is inevitable and here it is and I want you to know about it and councils felt like they were out of the loop but yet like you know you guys are not really appointed by them we're working together sort of like a team so I would support maybe the task force would come with that a means by which to periodically brief the council on this stuff I don't have a problem with that that's a good point I think that's hopefully this task force that can be one of the items that I just want to kind of write under the current framework whether it's kind of summary information that can be given which doesn't get so specific as to potentially violate confidentiality or violate executive session but can still be kind of summary information presented sure if there could be general data or something like that or just we're looking at two cases and one is a termination case yeah no that seems yeah and I think we had put that in the our annual report maybe we hadn't but I thought we had contemplated that maybe following executive session that's when we could do it but by the time we finish executive session sometimes it's 11 o'clock at night so the other option is that our next meeting is to report out what we did in executive session in general terms right so how many cases etc I mean that's one option is so that monthly we're keeping up with it and gather that data but that's not to the city council that you mean just in a public way well just for the public in terms of our minutes as well yeah yeah so I think those are two different questions one is whether city council can be updated in some in some higher priority fashion and also kind of how we disclose that information right and I would think the task force will come up with would you want monthly reporting and because it does become a matter of how and when right now I assume it will be looked at by the new task force but it seems like those recognitions are supposed to be done by November right it's June right now I think it's also important to in the task force work to understand the degree frankly to which the you know council may be a body that we advise on things but is not a disciplinary body or body that like weighs in on the investigations because it's important for them to be apprised but it would be a whole different matter for you know you guys I think the council me on what you think the outcome of an investigation should be and the council to say I have this opinion about how the investigation should go so I think as we go towards transparency we should also delineate like the process in a way that like makes it clear who has the authority to recommend who has the authority to account what the schedule is and what not and you know it's interesting everybody this is just my perspective and I do think the whole disciplinary thing is important where I stand I can't do anything about the past but the past can inform the future and the only way to get to the future is what you do in the present sounds a little esoteric but I believe it so I keep thinking of we can have the best use of force policy on the planet but we still have individuals out at two in the morning and it's human beings how do we equip officers with emotional management with empathy with compassion so that those use of force things can be executed in a way that serves the community and quite frankly serves the officer because I don't believe any of our officers want to hurt people I don't they went into policing because they want to help people so this is where my mind is going and we keep talking a lot about the discipline and that's great I want to figure out ways that we can train equip our officers with that other piece that I just talked about I just want to put that out there I think it's important to reiterate that when people are troubled by the conduct they saw these are officers that were called to a scene activated a body camera took the actions that they took took that footage downloaded it and gave it to a defense attorney I mean it wasn't like this was discovered by third party cop watch did not bring this to to light it was the officers who filmed what they did and handed it to people who have the authority to then inform civil litigants and bring the cases to court and show it to a judge so it just reflects on your thought that these are officers out there making these decisions and to say like it wasn't like wow I hope nobody notices that this happened that this gentleman hit his head and passed out when I shoved him there was no tampering with the footage it was distributed to everybody who had a stake in holding the officer accountable so a lot of it goes back to you know making the right decision in situ in the moment under all these pressures for me I feel like do we want discipline and fear of discipline and fear of public to inform an officer's behavior some people might say yes absolutely and in the short term that works but once six months is gone that doesn't work anymore what works is ongoing training ongoing empathy training ongoing really heart training and emotional management training that's kind of what ongoing is going to have long and lasting effects in my opinion sure I was just going to ask if you have any data for MSE so much evidence of training programs that actually don't produce significant so I was just wondering if that's just like based on your feelings about it or if that's based on data and evidence well it's funny that you ask I don't have data but I have been researching folks that do this kind of training there's actually an institute called heart math institute and there's two folks that they have that work with military and police officers on this type of training I don't have that data to show what the effects have been there's always about that so I don't have any solid data on it thank you okay let's see that was commissioner just to follow up I think what randa was saying that I think between now and when we actually finished this task force and we get recommendations and move forward in whatever direction I do think I did hear the same the city council meeting of a desire to be kept informed and I don't think there's ever been a mechanism to do that nor an expectation but now it seems to me we've been made aware that there is an expectation and consequently I think that we should at least on an ad hoc case by case basis if not some formal procedure between now and when we finished this task force if we have significant cases that we're knowing that we decide that we also need to communicate that to the city council and we can decide at that time how to best do that but I think I heard very clearly their frustration at not having heard in advance about the last ones and I don't think it was anyone's fault that's not how we've operated but now that we've made aware of their desire I think it's important that we respond to it so I wanted to follow up on randall earlier and had commented about someone else could explain about how I think I don't want to put words in your mouth but how it complains what the process is in general terms so I didn't know if anyone in attendance is wanting that information I gave that in the statement to the press a month ago but I didn't know if anyone wants background on what our executive sessions look like without talking about a particular case how a case comes in and how it's handled I don't want to talk just for the sake of talking and take up time so if anyone feels like they want that you can talk to us feeling very different and acting very different than if they feel in those moments that the accountability will be on and I understand that human beings are very complicated but I guess what I feel like is as a community member I watched the Burlington City Council meeting I was concerned about a general tone of case building in favor of those individuals who have done harm to our community and I'm really uncomfortable with that in terms of with eyes in that situation and I thought I might not be fully accountable for my negative behavior how does that impact you? I mean we're hearing your comment so in terms of like behind closed doors process that you engage in I heard some folks here really asking hard questions of one another and I'm wondering if that typifies your conversations behind closed doors do we have hard conversations asking those questions yes we do I mean we've spent hours talking about like I said in my opinion the process has had integrity we've disagreed with each other we've debated we also wrote a directive a few months ago that makes it clear that failure to report misconduct or corruption is an act of misconduct or corruption that's available online as well and that I wrote for this police department that exists in other places I think it's a unique procedure or directive in Vermont but the idea that officers should not have an expectation that what they're doing will be exonerated or covered up and one of the things you may disagree with the conclusions or the outcome but when we think a case arises to a level of seriousness we also don't investigate it ourselves we're used of like a buddy or a peer or an old friend investigating a case and again you may think that the punishments weren't severe enough you may think we came to the wrong conclusions in some cases and I don't want to go down the road too much of active investigations but I was testifying in Montpelier about drug policy reform when I got a call from Deputy Chief Mirad about finding Mr. Kilburn deceased to investigate that that has a nexus to our interaction with him a few days ago and we don't want to investigate that ourselves so people might say one police investigating another police or something like that you may find fault with that but the goal here is not cover-ups or exoneration and when you look at officers that get suspended for any period of time the next penalty after suspension is termination so that's on the table for suspension whether it's a 2-10 or 15-day suspension and we have in the past terminated officers for subsequent offenses that have been suspended I don't think they'd call that like covering up for them is what I'm saying okay next is consent agenda if anybody have any changes, modifications from the minutes of the previous meeting motion to accept that how much second all in favor next meeting's agenda items well I don't know if the city council will have approved the social media policy but that keeps getting bumped we'll see if they've approved it we'll put it on to look at that in terms of our media policy and the city social media policy the next meeting is June 25th so the task force will not be formed yet does anybody have anything right now if not we can talk over the next couple of weeks yes to us the annual report from the police department and just ask the chief if he could please with respect to the decrease in domestic violence is that trend that we'll explain next time is that trend continuing and if there's a reason for it because it seems very encouraging and I guess the only other one I would ask if there was an increase in aggravated assaults and I wonder if a fairly dramatic increase in aggravated assaults now if I wonder if that might be somehow a tribute to the old fact that you have people basically it sounds like coming in and out of the court system without really respecting it in other words it seems is this the same old troublemakers or is this something else so just those two issues if you could please okay because I think they have a real particularly the violence one seems very good news so chief that's the data from last year's report because we didn't update the data so would it be interesting to see what that data looks like for the next year yeah there has been an increase in aggravated assaults there's been modest decrease year over year in domestic assaults there's been a notable decrease in burglaries so we can talk so can you we did look a little bit into the aggravated assault for the next I was just thinking for the next can you answer it in like a minute good idea thank you we looked at a decent proportion of them and found that a lot of those aggravated assaults actually were drunken fights where someone punched someone and someone fell down and hit their head on the sidewalk and suffered a head injury and so it rose to a level of aggravated assault we're looking to see if there are any trends and we did make up a decent proportion mostly downtown hours at night people doing good job as far as policing the patrons or the bars doing a good job of policing the patrons well it's interesting about the question of over service I think that we have a big nexus between violence and intoxication downtown especially if you look at the use of force presentation I gave we looked at we overlaid time and day of the week and use of force and reported incidents and there's an overlay between like Thursday, Friday, Saturday 10 p.m. to 1 a.m. I think is the strongest yeah thanks Nancy and that correlates with bar fights yeah and one of the worries is that the liquor authority does a lot of licensing work they do a lot of work not just like onsite enforcement and I sort of wish and I've said it many cases many times I'll say it publicly I wish that they would do more aggressive enforcement of over serving, overcrowding etc they have so maybe you should talk to them yeah we get a piecemeal when we ask for it but they have in the past okay okay so what typically happens is there'll be some agenda items that come up I mean I have some ideas yeah but I have to talk to some folks to see who can come okay so the next meeting is June 25th does that work for everybody I won't be here but we'll have perfectly capable person okay great is executive session needed tonight yes you have two updates on internal investigations okay can I have a motion to go into executive session for disciplinary matters I move that we go into the next session for disciplinary matters all in favor okay so we will do that and thank you everybody for coming