 Welcome everybody. I'm so happy to see everybody here tonight to talk about this very important topic. We're going to be seeing the Citation of the Vermont Institute of Community and International Involvement, where we have been for a number of years putting on similar educational events in our town, education about public affairs, legal affairs, the Constitution. And now with Tom Simon we're going to be talking sometime about sports. So we are an organization that's devoted to critical thinking and education about public affairs. And I'm happy tonight to see one of our most important city residents and officials that are here with us to discuss the very important issue of policing the city and what is going on now in our city. So our guest tonight is Chief John Murat, who is with us to both talk about what's happening in our city and also to answer all community questions and to discuss with the community what is going on in our city. This will be moderated by the Executive Director of this very fine organization called the Association of Africans Living in Vermont. This is Jacob Pogra, who is the ED, correct, of ALV. And he is here to discuss and to lead the discussion with the Chief about our city and what's going on. I might say a little bit about the current reason why we're doing this, and I thank the Chief for coming. And that is that this organization is very involved with young people. And we are very involved in trying to prevent crimes, to educate young people, and to keep them out of trouble, put it that way. And so with that I'm going to turn this over to Jacob and to the Chief. And thank you all for coming. It's wonderful to see everybody here. Thank you. Thank you, Sandy. And thank you to you all for coming today. Happy New Year to those who are here and those who are watching from home. My hope is to use this opportunity as a way for us to discuss proactively and also see how we can support our community to be safer. Most importantly, as Sandy said, we are looking to find better ways of keeping our kids busy, but finding ways to keep them out of trouble so they can become productive citizens. No one alone can do that job if it is not the entire community. And this evening we are hoping that we can get more information and also more advice and support so the Chief Police can get some ideas on how to better support our communities and also help their fellow police officers to be part of this vibrant community. Thank you so much and welcome, Chief. Thank you. Thank you very much. And I'm pleased to be here. My name is John Murad. I am the Acting Chief of Police here in Burlington and I really am happy to have been invited. So thank you, Sandy, and thank you, Jacob, for agreeing to moderate. So I don't know how you want to kick this off or if you've got questions or what you want to do. Well, I would love it if you could tell us a little bit about what's happening in our city. Recently there was a Seven Days article that concerned me and concerned, I think, all of our residents in Burlington and in this community in particular. And we have here tonight actually, I'm not certain he was the writer of that, but we do have someone from Seven Days. That was an article that occurred in Seven Days sort of outlining the current perception and maybe reality that there has been a real spike in crime in our community and that spike in crime, particularly shootings, are being done or committed by young African American and also new American boys. And that does cause us all a little bit of concern, both if that is the reality and also what to do about it and also to put those figures in a little bit of context. Because of historical context, I would say, because if you look at crime everywhere in this city, in this country, I think you would find that most crime is done by perhaps young men of all races. And so we wanted to make sure that the chief was here to report on what's happening in the city and also to answer our questions about that. So that's why we say, and it's very, I think, good of you to be here and to answer those questions. Well, it's my pleasure. So just go on a little bit about that. All right. Well, welcome everybody. Thank you again for having me here. I brought with me a report, which is our preliminary year end report for 2022. And this is available online. The vast majority of our data is also available online. I do similar reports on a monthly basis to the Burlington Police Commission. This gives a very good picture of where we ended 2022. I'll be frank. I think 2022 is going to be looked upon in retrospect as a nader. I think it is a place where I am hopeful we move forward from both with regard to criminal incidents, to quality of life incidents, with regard to staffing in the police department, and with regard, I hope, to the way our city feels to the people who live in it and the ways in which we are working together or not, as the case may be right now. I think 2023 looks really great as we start it. I think that we have made an important turn with regard to some of the violence that Sandy mentioned that we were seeing, gunfire incidents, an absolutely horrific total of five murders in the city of Burlington, which we have never seen. I know that for sure going back to 1960. Data prior to that is sketchier, but I have no reason to believe that we've ever seen that in our city. We've never come close to it. We had 25, excuse me, I think we ended with one last one right after Christmas that brought us to 26 incidents of gunfire. That too is something that we certainly have not seen since we've been keeping track in 2012 of those kinds of data. Gunfire is not automatically a shooting. It's certainly not automatically a murder, but it's important because it's drastically different. We used to see about two a year and suddenly it exploded in 2020 and then in 2021. There were a dozen in 2020. There were 14 in 2021 and in 2022, as I said, we saw 26 incidents of gunfire. Gunfire, by the way, can be incidents in which a person is struck, a shooting can be incidents in which a person is struck and killed, which would be a homicide, but also can be just an incident in which we have what would be called probable cause that a gun was discharged. We have witness statements. We have recovered ballistics evidence. We have impacts. And it also requires reasonable suspicion that it was discharged in a criminal way. So for example, during seasons we do get reports of gunfire in the New North End out over the lake or in the interval for hunting purposes. That's not lawful by Burlington statute, but I do not count those as gunfire incidents. Suicide is not something that we would count as a gunfire incident. But mishandling a firearm, as we apparently saw in a bar the night after Christmas in a way that puts other people in danger, that is, even though no one was struck. So I think that we have turned a corner on that. I'm hopeful. I need to knock on wood here because things can change. But we made a lot of inroads in 2022 thanks to incredible work by the men and women in the Burlington Police Department's Detective Bureau, partners in the ATF, partners in other agencies, close work with the state's attorney for Chittenden County, Sarah George, to actually take strong steps against the people we believed were driving a lot of that gun violence. All five of those murders saw a resolution, one in which the person, he took his own life during the commission of the crime. So that there's no rest there, but we know the outcome. And the other four, we did make arrests in each of those. Those individuals have not yet been tried, but each has been charged. We have certainly made inroads on a number of the other kinds of gunfire incidents. I try to have the officers investigate every single one as if it were a shooting or a homicide because oftentimes the difference is merely a matter of inches. Frankly, we weren't as able to do that in 2022 simply because of the volume of them. Our detective unit was really overburdened. We've lost track to a certain degree of burglaries, something that we had paid, being able to pay more attention to, and other kinds of crime have ticked up. This report does show those numbers, and those numbers are about the incident call, that is the way in which a call comes across through 9-1-1 and dispatch. And so it may differ from the number that gets reported to the federal government insofar as the actual number of offenses or arrests, because not every call leads to an arrest, even though the act may have nevertheless happened. But the numbers are striking, and we saw a real change in 2022 versus the previous five-year average, and I believe we're turning a corner on it. We're turning a corner on it in part because the Mayor Weinberger has done just enormous amounts of work on this. In fact, I anticipate that he'll be making some major announcements about public safety in the next couple days. There is also incredible work that he did with our city council to try to repair some relationships. The city council and the mayor together gave us an incredibly strong fiscal year 2023 budget that was approved in June, began on July 1 of this past year. We'll extend through the first half of the coming year. Also a strong contract. We have one of the best police contracts in the state. And both of these tools are incredibly necessary for us to be able to rebuild because our department has been drastically depleted. It has been significantly reduced in ways that have proven not to be commensurate to the safety of our city. We are seeing conditions that we've not seen for years. We are seeing upticks in a variety of different kinds of category. And a lot of that does have to do with a diminution of the ability of the Burlington Police Department to respond and serve. About 25% of calls for service no longer get a direct police officer response. And the default until 2020 was that every single call got an in-person response from a police officer. Now we refer about 10% of them to online reporting and we refer an additional 16% into what we call stacking a call based on our priority response model. That too is described in this. It's also the first document at the top of the Burlington Police Department website. And the rationale for both of those is that we've gone from being an agency that was authorized for 105 and hovered in the high 90s, 97, 98, to being an agency that currently has 63 police officers. In addressing that, I created with mayor a public safety continuity plan. We presented it in December of 2020. We got it approved in February of 2021. And it includes the expansion of an existing role that we've always had in the department called the community service officer. We always had about two of those people. We now have authorization for 12 and I currently have 10. They are unarmed, unsworn officers. They don't have arrest powers or the power to use force. But they do have the ability to write municipal tickets and they respond to certain quality of life calls. And again, all those the calls to which we automatically deploy community service officers are apparent in the map of our priority response plan. Oh, goodness. Sorry. It's still there a little. No, it's gone. The other role that we created from whole cloth that did not exist before is our community support liaison or CSL. Those are in-house social workers. They are employees of the Burlington Police Department who have in some cases masters of social work but always social work backgrounds. They are there to address issues around houselessness, issues around substance use disorder, issues around chronic callers for mental health issues. And I created, I asked for six of those in that public safety continuity plan. I was approved for three. The new budget gives us six. And I'm confident that we're going to have all six hired. We have three right now. We're going to have all six hired by the first quarter of this calendar year. So basically in the next month or two. So in those pieces, you know, we're doing well with regard to building up the police department and putting new resources in place. Getting from where we currently are with police officers, as I said, 63, to what the city revised its estimate. We were at 105. They dropped us to 74. And then they raised it to 87 after a large report done by a consulting company. Getting back to that 87, which is where we're striving for right now, is going to take time. I believe that we're going to make really good progress on it this year. We've already made some progress. I've brought some officers back who had left who found that this was a city worth serving. And perhaps the places that they went weren't different in the ways they hoped that they were going to be. I've brought in new police officers. We just graduated three officers from the Vermont Police Academy in December. They are now in field training and they're out there on the street right now. I'm hopeful to have five, possibly six, attending the next Vermont Police Academy that begins in February of this year. They'll be on my book soon and that 63 will go up a bit. I will lose a couple of officers who are currently in what we call, you know, they're on terminal leave. They're basically burning through vacation in anticipation of retirement or resignation. And they're going to leave. So I won't get to 69, like I would hope if I were able to bring in six officers for the academy. But I think I will be, you know, at 65 or 66 even within the next month or two. And then it's a matter of keeping officers here and making sure that they stay with us, that we're supportive of them, that we see them through an academy that doesn't necessarily tell them how things are going to be done up here. Because Burlington does things differently. I believe Burlington does things better. I believe that Burlington has a way of policing, a community-oriented policing that has been remarkably successful over the years. Innovations around body cameras, innovations around de-escalation and the system called ICAT, which we co-developed with the Police Executive Research Forum. Innovations around use of force. We rewrote our use of force policy in June of 2020. And then the state essentially adopted it because it was what the country was looking for at that moment after the horrible, horrible murder of George Floyd. We are an agency that is working hard on these new alternative responses. That a lot of agents, no agency our size that I know of has these kinds of responses. And a lot of agencies in the state are coming to us to see how we're doing it around both the CSOs and the CSLs. So, you know, rebuilding that is my priority for this coming year. And I'm hopeful that that is going to help us address these numbers that were not good for 2022. And that we're going to continue to be as transparent as possible around other kinds of numbers that aren't in this report, but exist in our annual report, which is also available online, around disparities that we see in our numbers. Disparities in use of force, disparities in arrests. We have eliminated disparities in our vehicle stops with the caveat that I lost my analyst in August of this year. And I know that that statement is true for 2021, and I believe it to be true for 2022. It was up until August, but I haven't been able to run the numbers in the last couple months. Everything that is in this report is run by me. Everything, and you know, there are better data analysts out there for more complex kinds of data analysis. This is entirely my production as are, you know, most of the sort of the project that we've been undertaking in the department over the past several years. From a written perspective, from an implementation perspective, from a developer perspective, I am blessed to have an absolutely amazing team of women and men who work inside that agency and who are dedicated every day to what I dedicate my life to, which is keeping people safe by preventing and responding to crime and disorder with and for our neighbors. So I don't want to just keep going. Jacob's the moderator, so go ahead. Thank you so much, Chief. Thank you very much, Chief. Thanks. We would like to go around the room to give a chance to everyone to ask their question, and I would ask that we, I would ask that we remain brief so everyone can have a chance to ask a question. Thank you. We'll start with this side of the room. I'll be last. Can I hear what that kind of a mental recovery state question? Anybody? If someone wants to ask a question. Can we have a chance? I mean, I don't have a question right now. Can I reserve the right to ask one there? Yes. Okay. Thank you. Lucy? Yeah, I have a question. I have several. I'll start with one. Can I introduce Lucy Gluckus, a person who's been here often in these seminars. She's a wonderful community activist, and I'm sure she has a lot of questions, right? I do. I'm just going to keep it to one now. Yeah. Thanks for being here. Thanks for doing the same. Yeah, my current job, which is fairly recent. I'm working the last nine months at COTS with the homeless folks. Seeing a lot of concerns and issues around safety for a lot of directions. But I guess what I would start with is, can you tell us a little bit briefly about the kind of training you're doing now with your officers for de-escalation? That would be helpful to know. We can take three questions, and now the chief would answer that one. Okay. Thanks for that question. Yeah, I'm certain that your clients do feel an altered sense of safety. What I hear often when I'm out working on the street and talking to people is, you know, where are you guys? And we feel that clearly and acutely. You know, of those 63 officers, 22 of them are available for patrol, and that's stretched across seven days and 24 hours a day. So at any given time, there may only be three officers patrolling the city for, and overnight it's often two or less. So that is what I hear from the members of our community who are either unhoused or who are sleeping rough as it were, or who are in some ways the most vulnerable members of our community owing just to the way in which they are living on a daily basis. With regard to de-escalation and your question there. So the program I mentioned, it's called ICAT, which stands for Integrating Communications Assessment and Tactics. It was developed by the Police Executive Research Forum, which is a large Washington think tank around policing issues. And one of the agencies that helped co-develop it was the Burlington Police Department, starting in, I want to say, 2017 or 2016. It is a program that was designed after witnessing the ways in which English officers, none of whom are, or very, very few of whom are armed, address individuals who are armed with knives or other kinds of weapons, but not firearms. ICAT is a negotiation, deceleration, de-escalation program. And the deceleration part is the most important, slowing things down. The more you can slow something down, the more you can control it. And there are different ways to apply that for a person who's out in the open, a person who is armed, a person who is in an enclosed space, a person who is in an enclosed space with someone else that he or she can harm. There are a lot of different factors involved, and the ICAT program goes through a lot of them. We built an emergency response vehicle around that ICAT platform, and we train on it. We now have a number of officers who are what we call train the trainers. They've gone to train the trainer programming so that they themselves can deliver the training. In addition to that, we have a large number of officers who are negotiation qualified that builds on those same kinds of skill sets in that we no longer call it hostage negotiation. We call it crisis negotiation, and it has to do with the idea of how you can work on somebody and de-escalate them and achieve some kind of sympatica with them in order to be able to communicate. The thing is, de-escalation is not a magic wand. It is not a magic bullet. It is not something that works every single time. It is important that in your line of work you deal with that and not irregularly. People who are elevated and escalated, and sometimes what you do works, and sometimes it doesn't. And with police officers, the same is true. It is always supposed to be attempted and tried. That's part of our policy, part of that use of force directive that I wrote in the summer of 2020, and that we then had the state largely adopted. But it's not every single time. There are times where that is not possible, and that is a threshold between somebody who works at Cots or is a street outreach worker and a police officer, which is that there is the ability at some point to take out physical action if necessary. That always has to be done lawfully. It always has to be done within policy and training. It always has to be done compassionately and carefully, but it does happen. There is no magic way of avoiding every single conflict. Chief, if you don't want to answer this question, don't answer it. I'll ask it. I'm Steve Goodkind. I used to work for the city. How do you think not having a chief, a fully appointed chief for three years, how has that affected the ability of the department to get manpower increased and encourage people to come here? Personally, I think you should have been appointed three years ago. I don't know if you're the best chief in the world, but we needed a chief, and you would have been the person. But how has that affected the ability of this department to get back on its feet when you're making commitments, you're promising, and then people look at it and say, well, look at the turmoil. This guy hasn't been appointed himself for three years. If you don't want to answer it, don't, but if you do, I'd like to hear it. Thank you. So, first of all, I'm definitely not the best chief in the world. I make mistakes. There are things that I wish that I could do better. There are, you know, relationships in the city that I think that we all could work better on. And I think the fact that that confirmation process went the way it did in January of 2021 is indicative of some of those things. That said, you know, on a day-to-day operational basis, my status doesn't impinge on anything. It doesn't affect anything. I am privileged to have the confidence of the men and women inside the organization because they have mine and they know it. I do hold them accountable. I have fired officers. I have disciplined officers when necessary, but they trust that I am doing so in a way that is fair, and they know that I care about them. I'm also privileged and honored to have the confidence of the mayor. So on a day-to-day basis, this doesn't make a difference. What you're asking is the one place where I've sensed a little bit of validity to the concern, which is this, as we seek to rebuild, I have a target of basically bringing aboard at least six police officers in every recruit class. Once in February, once in August, once in February, once in August, and I've got to do that for several years. It's equivalent to basically, these are some of the best numbers we've ever had. That's as good as our numbers get in history. It's essentially, you know, being for, I don't know, who's a Boston fan, I am, it's Vermont. You got to pull off 2004, like three years in a row, and that is very, very challenging to do, right? So I need six officers in recruit, and I need three laterals at least, 3.4 as a matter of fact, each year, and our average has only been 1.2 each year over the past decade plus. So recruit officers, I don't know that this impacts them quite as much, but I do think there's something to be said for a savvy lateral officer, someone that is who is already a police officer in another state is accredited and is probably going to do his or her due diligence when they think about coming to Burlington, and they look and they say, two and a half years, coming in on three years, either he's not very good or there's something wrong in the city, and maybe I'm going to think about that. I've heard that does resonate with me a little bit, but other than that, I am privileged to have the confidence of the men and women in the agency. I'm privileged to have the confidence of the mayor. I know that I have many of my neighbors support. There are things I want to do better. There are things, the mistakes I've made that I want to, you know, I can't undo, but that I want to learn from and grow from, and I am here every single day. My parents are in the room. They, you know, have lived in Chinden County for 52 years. I have been here my entire life, I haven't been here, let me correct that. I was born here when they still called it Mary Fletcher. My dad taught at UVM for 35 years. I came back here. My mother taught there for 20 something plus. Sorry, I did not mean that, mom. I'm going to be in trouble now. I love this community. My wife and kids and I live in the city. My kids go to public school here. I don't have any intentions of going anywhere, and I wake up every day feeling proud and privileged to serve this place. It has been exhausting over the past two and a half years. I'm not going to deny that. Worrying about whether or not I was going to have to fire police officers in the summer of 2020 when people were talking about the first discussions about diminishing headcount. Addressing these issues as we've, as headcount has plummeted, losing friends who've decided to leave this agency in this profession sometimes has been challenging. Seeing the way in which crime is impacting the community, being somebody who felt for a while like a bit of a Cassandra as I talked about where gunfire incidents were going in 2020 and 2021 and not really being listened to until it exploded in such a way in 2022 that even seven days had to acknowledge it. That has been challenging. It has been tiring, but I'm here and I'm not going anywhere. And I, and that's irrespective of what my status is. I want this job and I want to be able to serve this community. I'm curious and I appreciate, I think everybody sharing the information and particularly your chief. There's a growing narrative that I'm concerned with that gun violence is directly correlated to seemingly black youth being out of control in the city of Burlington and You good? Part of my curiosity in being here in part of this conversation is finding out how real is that? Is there, you know, we're talking about data from what's going on from last year into this year. I've had different conversations with different people around the city and it seems like the violence has increased but it's not predominantly or disproportionately represented or reflected specifically in black communities. I'm trying to understand with this growing narrative that seems to be kind of gaining traction and what it is that where that's coming from and certainly I think some of the conversation that Jacob started with was not only addressing that after the fact but what is the conversation and narrative around what's being done before we get to that point. So whether or not that's taking the conversation in a different direction or not, I'm curious to hear from you Jacob. I'm certainly curious to hear from you as well chief but also important to say I needed help yesterday and your officer showed up and did one hell of a job for me. So thank you for that as well. You know, we were all sudden to see the way the community went through a lot of violence over the past years but we have also thought that these kids and these men and women who are living here are part of our community. You know, we cannot feel good if one member of the community is not better and as a community we are looking at ways of working together, reaching out to our impacted community, asking them what we did not do well, what we can do better to help everyone win themselves out of violence and also look at what is driving this violence. Is it lack of opportunity? Is it lack of attention? Is it drug related or what as community member, mostly adults, what are we doing to better support the younger generation? I'm not that old but I think I can do something to support a young man that is in trouble. I think we can do something as community to support each other so we can identify signs of weaknesses to better support each other. Looking at our kids, what kind of education are we giving them? What type of support are we giving them or what type of opportunity are we giving them so they don't fall through the cracks? And these are things that we cannot do as an organization alone. We should look at that as a community to come with productive ideas that can better our kids so they remain out of trouble. And this is something we are also trying to do in the coming days. Our organization is going to set community need assessment first through focus group and also one-on-one surveys to see what we can do exactly to at least better support the kids. And the findings we are going to gather from the community will also be shared with the providers so we can all work together to come with better ways of supporting each other. Thank you. I think that really gets at the prevention aspect that you're talking about. You know, in the other piece, I think that the solution to these and to the prevention of these is in the community, but the fault is not. And communities don't commit these crimes. Individuals do. People do. And unfortunately, there is truth to the demographic make up of those people. But those people are not a community. They are a fraction. They are individuals. Really, we're talking about, you know, I mean, 26 gunfire incidents in the course of a year. That's 26 people. That is not a vibrant, you know, community that represents in our youth almost closing in on 50% of our schools, right? That is not that number. That is 26. Ditto the actual, the homicides and the murders. You know, there were five of those. They are awful. They are awful. In each of them, on both sides of the equation was a person of color. We are seeing that. What are we doing about that? It is incredibly uncomfortable to discuss. It's incredibly hard to talk about. But if we don't, and if we don't work on addressing it, then we can't let the community be the source of the solution. Even as I'm saying quite clearly, I do not believe that the community is at fault. I think that we've done a tremendous job over the years of addressing many young people who might otherwise have joined the, you know, in some cases, anonymous 26. I don't know all 26 people who pulled those triggers in those gunfire incidents. Some of them we don't have any real information on. I have, you know, as I said, I have homicides in four. Then there was also a knife homicide. I have people struck in a total of 13, including those four homicides. I have another three in which people were shooting at one another and we have proof of that. That gets me up to 16. The next 10, some of them we have a sense of, and others we don't, because all we've got is evidence that it occurred and probable cause that it occurred and reasonable suspicion that it was criminal, but we don't have suspects and we don't have a lot of solvability factors. I have no idea who committed those. But for the ones where we do have ideas, there is a disproportionality in them. And how do we address that? How do we talk about it, especially if we're not allowed to talk about it? Part of the issue is that I think that we've done a great job of preventing a lot of people from doing this, because we're only talking about 26 total incidents and a smaller number of that that involve a group of young people who are from our community and have lived here for a long time. And there were many, many people who did not go down these roads and ultimately undertake this kind of activity. And the people who did are people that we need to figure out how we address. How do we prevent others from following that same path? That's something I think we're in the midst of. I think that's really important. I think the mayor's gonna be making some important announcements about that in the coming days. I am incredibly eager to participate in those plans. I know that there have been discussions at AALV here. I've been in them. I've been in the homes of people whose children are on the cusp of this and sometimes have committed some of this, who are striving for answers about what we're gonna do. And I have worked with the Boys and Girls Club about it. I've talked with the King Street Center about these things. All of us need to come together in order to really address it. And that includes the why. And I was just talking with Kyle last night about these issues. I think that there are a lot of opportunities for us here, but we do have to recognize what it is that's in front of us. Eric Johnson, who is the mayor in Dallas, spoke at the International Association of Chiefs of Police Conference, which took place in October this past year, October 22. A huge conference in Dallas. Law enforcement from around the world attended this event. And Mayor Johnson said that one of the shifts for him, having grown up in impoverished neighborhoods in Dallas and having come back after going away to be educated and coming back to be the mayor in Dallas and finding a really strong police chief who's doing really innovative stuff and is having tremendous success in the Dallas department. His statement was this. I don't know that I agree with it entirely, but I'll repeat it. The people that made his neighborhoods bad when he was growing up were not the victims of a flawed system. They were the flaws in the system, and they represented a small group, not nearly the whole. He was trying to get to school every day. He was trying to figure out how he was going to navigate these communities, and the folks that were causing the problems were making it more difficult for him and for everyone else. And how do we address those? Now, frankly, when somebody like that gets to the point where the things that we saw this past summer have happened, I don't know that there's much that we can do but follow through on policing and enforcement, but that's not what we want. We get to someplace where we can stop that before it occurs, and we've been successful at it. The Boys and Girls Club has, AALV has, because for all the individuals who we have arrested over the course of this past year and a half, who we have sometimes arrested and seen released, there are many, many, many more who don't engage in this. And I think we give them less credit than they are due when we talk about all these things that made the others go the wrong way because so many people went the right. I'd like to sort of address that. My name is Sandy Barrett. I'm an attorney, and I have the great privilege of working here with AALV. And one of the strongest things that I think could help to prevent even these individuals from committing crimes is if we had, if the community itself realized that many families are in trouble here economically and if families, especially mothers, were more strongly supported by our community, I believe that all children would have a better chance to grow up and not commit crimes. What I see in our entire society, and this means the United States, is the neglect of mothers. And I have seen that. I saw that in the State House when I was in the State House and watched welfare payments be cut for largely single mothers. I've seen a total neglect of the mothers in our society, and that has got to be rectified because mothers cannot bring up children and control large families unless they have the support of the community, economically and emotionally and financially. AALV actually does a lot of that. They support the children of this community. I know that Sam Digbaugh does not want to be particularly recognized, but every afternoon Sam, who works here, has many, many kids come here after school to hang out, to get to know each other, to form a community, to make strong bonds between boys and girls, which is so essential to bring up a healthy society. And this AALV recognizes that the families and the children of our community need to be support if we're going to prevent crime. They need our support and our love, and I can't say that more strongly. I have a question. I've heard that you've been talking a lot with community members, and I was wondering if you could extend those community conversations about what you all prioritize for alternatives and what alternatives you're currently utilizing, and if just more of us could be brought into that. And I just have to say, because I'm a prison abolitionist, that I do not believe that people are flaws, and I believe that there are so many signs along the way that we failed to pick up on. Personally, I knew one of the victims, my comrade and I both did, and we had a conversation about how many signs there were in his behavior and how we were just adolescents at the time, and we could see that he was headed for a really dark path. So I feel like we just have, as a community, have to have more conversations about what our obligations are to each other, too. So I just want to say. Well, my name's Jaina Ossoff, and I'm here with my comrade, Clea Livingston. We run Free Her Vermont, which is an abolitionist organization here, and we are mobilizing around the state's efforts to construct a prison campus, which will cost $250 million. So, yeah. Yeah. I have a question, but I'll let other folks go ahead. Okay. I just wanted to say thank you for expressing that in that way, and for having, obviously, we don't entirely agree on this topic, but the ability to actually talk with one another in this way is something that is lacking in a lot of instances and is really important. I think that what you're striving for is noble, and I think that it is something that I wish I did believe was entirely possible, but I don't. Not in the position that I'm in, but I love that you're talking about it, and I would love to talk with you more. Insofar as involving other groups and things, I'm happy to do that. My outreach is much more ad hoc. We don't have large-scale sort of meetings, but it was done for some time. It was made impossible by the pandemic for about a year and a half of my tenure, and then since it has been challenging as well. It is more ad hoc. It is more, as they say in politics, it's retail. I go to people's homes. I talk with individuals. I have one-on-one conversations. The fact that I haven't done it in more over largely public ways has sometimes been one of those things that I regret that I talked about. But I would love to be able to talk more with all of you about that. Sure. Thank you. And I would like to remind also those who are on Zoom to please raise their hand, and we will get back to you if you have a question. Hello. My name is Kalia Livingston once again. I guess I'm just curious about where you found this correlation between expanding the police force and decreasing transgressions mostly for the fact that police tend to show up after the fact and secondly, if there hasn't been enough research into what is the root causes of people leading to these transgressions with our racist history in policing in Brailington, I feel unsafe with the idea of expanding the police force before we have efficiently address those issues. Sorry. That's a good question. There is plentiful academic literature on the fact that police presence does in fact result in decreased crime. There are some studies that say the opposite and as in all things, there's a famous Mark Twain quote that is there are lies and damned lies and then there are statistics. And so studies can sometimes be manipulated in these ways but the majority of studies say quite clearly that police presence and larger numbers of police do in fact equal gains in public safety. There comes a point at which you ask whether or not the gains are worth what you're getting and whether or not you're getting no longer a strong rate of return that definitely happened in New York City in the mid-2000s prior to 2002 through 2009. They drastically increased enforcement and got very few gains in return and caused more blowback than they were gaining through that kind of enforcement. That's not something that we're looking for here. I think what we're looking for here is to rectify a situation that the past two and a half years has shown wasn't necessarily the best way to do what we were seeking to do and was frankly a mistake certainly from my perspective. Our staffing situation has not been good for the city and it has not been good for people's public safety. That said, how do we address some of the concerns that the city is facing? I am bringing in an organization called the Center for Policing Equity to do training with our police department. We have a long history of cultural competency training, of anti-bias training. This is training that deals with the history of racism and including the ways in which police have been at times the authors of that problematic history and it does so in conjunction or excuse me in compliance of June 2020 that was also the source of the diminishment of the headcount. I am hopeful to be able to work with them on studying through the lens of the 14th amendment and the way in which citizenship was extended to various groups at various times in our history and the ways in which sometimes that extension was not full and was not fair and was problematic. We meet the requirement of having a fulsome discussion of history and the roots and presence of systemic aspects of racism in our society. So that's a component of something that we're doing and I hope that that is an avenue towards a a person actually feeling better when a police officer arrives but also being able to at least have a sense that things are better when that police officer arrives and for both the officer and for the members of the community that's who we're here to serve. That's a good question. Kind of, yes. No, it's okay. This is my first time being at anything like this so I am happy to be here. My name is Caitlin. I'm also with FreeHer. I volunteer on the core team and my question is I'm wondering how you're implicating alternative ways to help these individuals that have been involved in the crime. I know that you probably have a standardized way of having to deal with the crime that's happening. I'll move forward, sorry. So I'm just wondering because I know it's a lot deeper with lack of access, education, mental health, especially coming fresh off the pandemic. That too is a terrific question. The fact is that you know, we do a number of things that we can do. We preemptively refer the vast majority of our misdemeanor level crimes crimes that are not eligible for arrest but are instead eligible for citation under Vermont law directly to the community justice center for alternative justice. And that means we don't send them to court. That has been a compounded reason. It was partly because the court shut down, meant that everything that we submitted to the court was going to be returned to us anyway. There is more work inputting something forward to the court as we were really struggling with officer availability. But it's also because I believe in it. I believe in the efficacy of alternative justice for the vast majority of participants. There are those who will not allocate. To allocate means to admit that you've done what you've done and that is a key component of alternative justice. There are those who will not recognize the harm they have done others in participating in that process. There are those who won't show up for that process. And I am in favor of continuing to refer the volume of case that we have referred to there. I have two things that I'm going to be changing in this coming year. One is that every single one of those cases has to go to the state's attorney somehow for notification at the very least. So that it does not appear that these things aren't happening from the level of the state's attorney's office. And two, there have to be teeth for people who don't follow through on the alternative justice program. Now that's where we get into disagreement about whether or not a sense of teeth is incarceration for some. And that's clearly not going to be where you guys are. But there have to be consequences. I don't think anybody believes that that's not the case. And so figuring that out is something that I think is a challenge for us. And I'll leave it at that. I'm Reverend Mark Hughes. I'm the executive director of the Vermont Racial Justice Alliance. And I'm also a minister at New Alpha Missionary Baptist Church, the only black church in Vermont, in the African American tradition, that is. And I'm also the commander of post-782 Howard Plant, the Veterans of Foreign War, here in the city of Burlington. I am a 14-year resident in the state. And I am the author of Operation Phoenix Rise and also the author of the In conjunction with Zariah, the resolution that was just mentioned in 2020, I wrote it on my honeymoon. And so I want to just kind of pivot a little bit and I don't have any questions. But I want to pivot a little bit and just direct the conversation somewhere because I want to premise where I'm coming from. And yeah, I'm also, just to your point, I too am nervous to in this setting. I am because I'm triggered in this setting. So I'm nervous too. Okay? And many black people are, you know, in the, especially in, you know, whenever there's something official, or if there's a law enforcement officer in the room, or something like that. So it's okay to show up and admit that. It's fine. If you're welcome. And the premise that I'd like to come at is in the community is they have everything that they need. Not that there is this concept of public safety because this premise is the premise under which we wrote the resolution and under which we wrote Operation Phoenix Rise. And the components of it, I think, are very, very important to understand because what we wanted to do was just to divest in the apparatus, which was central in the city, and reinvest in what is now the Richard Kemp Center. That's one of the objectives we sought to accomplish. That money never made it. But we still open the Richard Kemp Center. So the thing about the Richard Kemp Center is it's precisely designed to do all of the things that we're talking about is to provide that ability to provide those programs and services to black and brown folks in our community that historically have been underserved where the programs and services have been inefficient, ineffective, or nonexistent. So today we came over, we passed by, and there was a job fair going on in the Richard Kemp Center. There was the Black Artist Showcase that was going on over last Friday. There was the Black Artist Market that was going on. We've got other events that are happening that are only designed to provide services like adult basic education and basic computer skills and even now there's after school programs there for black kids, by black people. So that was the intention and that's what it will continue to serve. And I think the what's good about what we're doing here with that premise is that we have and we continue to stand open armed to work with the AALV and Jacob and Tato excited about some of the work you're doing. Really would appreciate it if we were able to figure out ways to come together and do this work collectively as black folks in our community. We invite that. Our arms are open to you. I'll follow up. I have your number. I have her number. I'm happy to do that because these are the things because again what we're trying to do is make sure everybody has everything they need. Everybody around us. There's this thing called systemic racism. We know that in this backdrop of what it is that we're experiencing that we hit a perfect storm, John. So this anomalous activity that's happening in the safest state in the United States that's what the governor said twice last week. This backdrop that we're experiencing where in historically this language of public safety has been used and politicized as if the Kerner report was never written in this environment where we know that there is a storm, a perfect storm, George Floyd a pandemic that we've never experienced before. Right now we have a global crisis in healthcare and mental wellness. Currently there's huge great resignation that also affects all police departments by the way. So we're talking about a perfect storm and we need to contextualize what it is that we're talking about and we need to be careful about the language that we're using because it's incredibly harmful in our communities and we need to look into our communities and we need to turn into ourselves Jacob to help ourselves. What we need is we need the resources directed into our communities to enable us to take care of ourselves. We don't need the police to do that. We need police. Police are good. We also need jails and by the way I'm a slavery abolitionist. We're the ones that put forward PR2. So all I'm really getting at here is that this premise I reject I brought a couple folks with me I do support the work of intervention but prevention that comes in our houses that comes in our communities and that starts with our people and I'm open armed. We already have some stuff on the calendar. Folks will be reaching out to you Jacob and I think we're going to be doing something for MLK at the Richard Kemp Center for everybody who's involved. My name is Rajni Eddins. Yeah the blackest beautiful film series. Yes. My honor yeah I think it's important to bring anything we can to bear that can humanize and sensitize our communities. I agree with what's been said as far as the history of this nature being so steeped the history of this country's nature being so steeped in white supremacy and systemic racism I think it's very important to understand that as a foundational reality. I know we've had some conversations in the past chief through Kyle at the Y and thought actively with other officers about the meaningful value of sharing our experiences historically and how we can build community that actually offers people the resources they need. I think too that the prevention of crime does lie in us being able to rely upon each other like us being able to build together Jacob as Mark had said thinking about the history of the portrayal of black people as a danger and as the source of crime without the recognition of the historical conditions that brought it about are problematic and if we don't speak to these things directly and have viable relationships out of conversations like this and follow up with one another then we maintain the same patterns of disconnection and I think we fail ourselves when we overly rely upon police departments and other organizations rather than ourselves as black people and members of the black community when we see what the debilitating impact this culture has on the minds of our young people as evidenced by what's been happening with the perfect storm so I think I'll just put that into the environment to encourage us in all ways that we can to be there for each other as human beings for the black human beings in the community find ways to work together to build with one another and I think that's it. I just wanted to say that the history of policing jails and prisons have dismantled black unity and communities and family along the way that has stopped us from having the ability to be able to look out for each other and be in community and be together and I appreciate you bringing up the notion of public safety mark because how are we defining public safety and as government people I don't believe we've ever been asked how we want to define public safety and how we want to address harm. As prison abolitionists we are absolutely for holding people accountable it's just how do we hold people accountable in a way where we're building up communities and helping people thrive instead of putting people into this prison cycle that is just creating lots of money for the state and lots of harm in our communities. One thing I think that these young women are involved in legislature right now is that? We are pushing a prison moratorium bill which we are asking for a five-year pause on any jail and prison construction in the state in order to create a reinvestment plan for the $250 million that the state is trying to put into these four new prisons. We really for yes two for men and two for women so we're really hoping to get as many people on board to be a part of that conversation to figure out what we actually need in our Vermont communities instead of building four new prisons and expanding the carceral state. Thank you. Thank you. Any final questions? Thank you so much. I think maybe we should plan again. So there's a much more robust plan that went into the all of the news that we saw about the reduction in the police force. There was a robust community engagement in that process. We directed it. There was a complete analysis of the police department. It happened. The report was delivered by CNA. We're not talking about that. There were over 150 or 160 recommendations to the department. We're not having that conversation right now. So that all of that stuff is in play which is where some of the SROs and all of the stuff that John was talking about came from well not the SROs the other ones the CSOs that's where that came from. Well it supported it. Thank you. So the thing is is that this this initiative to address a tweak in the alleged public safety system we'd like to call it the community health and wellness apparatus is what I'd like to refer to it as but this tweak in this system was not simply haphazard it was really thought through and there was a lot of other details that went into it just to be clear. So there was community involvement and they did indeed make suggestions towards the point that you were talking about. Thank you Mark. I don't know if we have some questions online but I would like to say thank you to all of you for taking your time to come tonight but this is as we said at the beginning this is just the beginning of a conversation. As a community we should find ways of sharing our ideas to our law enforcement agencies and also to other service providers so we can provide better support to everyone in this state. I'm looking at our kids I'm looking at ways of supporting the kids in school so the schools can be part of the education system not just having kids during the day and letting them go without inquiring about their safety at home. I'm looking at ways we can support parents so they can provide for the families but also be there for the kids attending the school, the games attending the school meetings learning from the school what they can do better to also support the kids but also you as a service provider some of you have been here longer enough. You know the city you know our community and you can share your experience with the younger generation and these are things that can always help our kids win themselves from violence and I hope we will continue to share these ideas with everyone so we can have a better and safer community. Thank you so much. Thank you again to John and to the law enforcement agencies not only in Burlington but throughout the Chidendon County that have always worked together to support and make sure that we remain safe. Thank you.