 Good morning, Brynne, thank you for being with us this morning. We're going to start this morning with a walkthrough of the language in 464, so that we can all understand what the bill aims to do and some of the details of that. Great, nice to see you all. Good morning for the record, Brynne Hare from Legislative Council. So 464 does a few different things, and I think that it works primarily in a statute that you're pretty familiar with, which is the statute dealing with a fair and impartial policing policy and race data collection. So I'm going to start there in section one. So section one requires that in addition to the existing data that is roadside stop data that law enforcement is required to collect, it adds that law enforcement is also required to collect at every roadside stop information about any use of force that's employed to effectuate the stop or any use of force that's employed during the stop. So that is in addition to the other demographic information and rationale information that's required to be collected. Down on subsection two there, this is the section that requires law enforcement to work with the Criminal Justice Training Council and a vendor that's chosen by the council on the specifics of that data collection. So like how the data is collected, how it's stored, how it's analyzed. And the change that's made here is that it requires law enforcement agencies to also work with the executive director of racial equity on these specifics about the data collection, storage, and dissemination. So I'm going to move on here. So subdivision three here, this is a requirement that law enforcement provides. Do you have a question on that? Well, I just want to go back. So the bill adds language in terms of the data collection, the type of force employed during the stop. Maybe I'm naive and maybe law enforcement can answer this, but wouldn't that be part of their normal production work already? I mean, if they had to use force or some sort. Well, this is a requirement that they collect that data and that particular piece of data is subject to all the requirements of the statute. So it has to be a part of the data that is submitted to the vendor that's chosen by the council so that data can be analyzed and posted publicly. So I imagine it would. So they may have it, but they just may not share it. Exactly. Okay, great. Thank you. So subdivision three, this is the requirement that law enforcement provide that data to the vendor electronically annually. And it requires, so the change that's made here is that the data also be shared with the executive director of racial equity. If the vendor that's chosen is no longer able to receive that data. So originally the language required that any vendor that's chosen by the council, if that vendor can no longer continue to receive the data, and right now that's the Vermont crime research group, the council would receive the data instead. So this directs the data to go to the executive director of racial equity rather than the criminal justice training council if that vendor is no longer able to receive and process that data. Subdivision four, this is a requirement that the receiving agency, the vendor, posts the data publicly and it just adds a couple words there that that data should be user-friendly, posted in a user-friendly manner. And that is the extent of the changes to this statute. Are there any questions about section one? I'm going to move on to section two. This is a new section of law. Some of this language might look a little bit familiar to you because it's modeled after the fair and impartial policing statute. So this language requires that the criminal justice training council with some stakeholders develop a model policy regarding the use of force, de-escalation tactics, and cross-cultural awareness. So you'll notice that the dates in here or the year should need to be updated because this bill was introduced last year. So you can just imagine that that 2019 is 2020. So it would require that prior to October of this year, the council in consultation with Vermont League of Cities and Towns, Vermont Human Rights Commission, and the executive director of racial equity create this model policy. And honored before January of 2021, every law enforcement agency has to adopt a policy that meets at least the minimum elements of that model policy. So they could adopt their own policy, but it has to at least meet the standards that are set forth in the model policy that's created by the council and the stakeholders. So this is really the same process for this model policy as it currently exists for the fair and impartial policing policy. So it's just a new policy for law enforcement. I'm slow. What's the difference between the... We already said they got to adopt a fair and impartial policing policy. And now this is a new policy, but it sounds just similar. I may not be... So I don't think it is similar because it's more about policing tactics. So use of force, de-escalation, and I'm sure that their law enforcement can talk to you with more, a little bit more eloquently about de-escalation tactics. But I see this as being different because it's more about the way that people are... the way that law enforcement is policing. I will ask for further clarification when police... Sorry. Thank you. I just, you know, maybe we can incorporate tattoo together or something. Okay, subsection B requires that if a law enforcement agency that's required to adopt this policy fails to do so before January 1st of next year, that law enforcement agency is deemed to have adopted the model policy that's established by the council and the stakeholders. And then subdivision C provides annually in September. Law enforcement has to report to the council on whether it has adopted this new policy and its law enforcement officers have received training on it. Again, this is all language that's drawn from the Farron and partial policing statute, so it's very similar. Subdivision D provides that on or before October 15th of it would be 2021, the council, the criminal justice training council reports to the legislature on which law enforcement departments and officers have adopted the policy and whether their officers have been trained on that policy. And then a year later, the council is required to review and update that policy if necessary, and that's in connection with...in consultation with stakeholders, including the Attorney General and the Human Rights Commission. So that would happen every other year thereafter. Do you know if the drafter of this bill consulted law enforcement as the dates were being established? How long this process should take and when to report back? No, it's only modeled on the sort of staggering of the dates in the Farron and partial policing statute. So I don't think they had direct input on these dates. So Section 3 amends the minimum training standard statute. So these are the courses that are required for basic training. So if you look down at Subdivision Section E, it adds training on this new policy regarding appropriate use of forest de-escalation tactics and cross-cultural awareness to the requirements for basic training. And Subdivision 2 requires, and there's a couple of words that are missing here, but it would require that on or before March of 2021, law enforcement receive a minimum of four hours of training on that new model policy. So it should say on or before March 31, 2021, law enforcement officers shall receive a minimum of four hours of training on the appropriate use of forest de-escalation tactics and cross-cultural awareness policy as required by the Subsection. Just to make it clear that that is the policy that the training is required for. We have the effective date. Is it required now for de-escalation? No, I don't know the answer to that. I mean, I got to believe that's part of their training today. I think there are other people in the room who could answer that question better than I can. I guess one is a question, one is a concern. Obviously, I have some real questions about the timeline here, as far as like when I see that every officer will receive four hours of training by the end of March. That's a huge heavy, heavy lift. And I'm wondering, some of these stakeholders, as far as what the intent is, is what are they going to bring to the discussion? Say like the executive director of the racial equity. What are they going to contribute to the discussion about de-escalation? What particular skill sets are we looking for these folks to have? Because I'm making an assumption here, but there's going to be a significant role for mental health professionals to play. I would assume in the training and the actual, I guess putting together of this. Yeah, so that's not the focus of this bill as it was introduced, but I think you've hit on something that is a change that we would need to make, that we need to also recognize that de-escalation of instances where people in mental distress needs to be a part of that training as well. It's been part of the perspective of how the training is developed. Okay, I guess, am I missing something here? I mean, there's a de-escalation of, there's a mental health situation going on where we're talking, as well as just any interaction that doesn't necessarily have a mental health component to it. I guess I'm trying to understand what's the purpose of this bill here. Well, our representative, Gina, is the lead sponsor, and we can certainly ask him to come back and review with us what his intent was. But I think we've got some other folks who are coming to testify who can also share some data and some perspectives on why this bill is being put forward and what value it brings. Any questions for Bryn on the words on the page? Thank you. Susanna, would you join us? And before you launch into your perspective on this bill, I would love it if, since this is your first time here with us in this committee, tell us a little bit about who you are and help us understand the work that you have before you, generally, as well as why you're here talking about this bill. Yes. All right. Well, first of all, Buenos Dias, thank you for having me. I am Susanna Davis, your new racial equity director, and have been here since July 30th. It was, I believe, my official start date, 29th. So I've been here for about six months. And as you all already know, my role is one that was created by and after the legislature. I signed into law in 2018. Alongside my role was also created a five-member advisory panel with five appointees who are to serve in an advisory capacity to the person in my role. And some of the mandates in the enabling statute for me include conducting top-to-bottom organization review with all three branches of state government to identify systemic racism, developing performance targets and metrics, developing and conducting trainings for all state agencies, developing model policies and diversity policies for state agency use. Let's see. Serving as liaison to the Governor's Workforce Equity and Diversity Council, the Human Rights Commission, and the Governor's Cabinet. I also sit on a number of committees, work groups, and other task forces, including when alluded to the social equity standards in schools, the Act I group, a diversifying the educator workforce group with the New England Secondary Schools Consortium. I interact with the racial disparities in the criminal and juvenile justice systems workgroup. I sit on the justice reinvestment workgroup and a number of others. Why do you sleep? My freezer tells what you're not. Right, right. So that is a snapshot of what the enabling statute lays out for me in the five-year period that it lays out for the existence of my role. And aside from that, what I'm currently working on or what I hope to work on in the next few months over the course of this year are the continued development and rollout of an equity policy for the state, looking at our existing state workforce employment and employee policies and working to strengthen those, expand those, modernize those, also helping people around the state just learn about the topic of equity, specifically racial equity. I find that one huge barrier to making progress on some topics like these is that a lot of people simply don't recognize how it impacts them. And I can assure you it impacts every single person in our state whether they recognize it or not. So there's a large educational element as well that accompanies the work and that often must precede the work. So I'm happy to expound on any of that, but that's sort of an overview of where I am right now. Well, regarding the bill at present, I can summarize my perspective on it very succinctly by saying that I agree wholeheartedly with its spirit, with its goals and with the aim of the legislation, and I share a lot of those goals myself. And I also would like to see the opportunity to work with public safety on enacting a lot of, on enacting all of these changes through a global comprehensive modernization plan. I have been made aware that there are approximately 229 bills currently on the table in the legislature related to public safety and just from my time working in the legislature of another jurisdiction and my limited time here, what I've discovered is that oftentimes when we look at an issue through the lens of multiple bills, sometimes we end up creating redundancies or duplication of work or adding challenges. And so, again, I agree 100% with much of what's in this bill. However, I would like to see something more comprehensive and acted that incorporates all of this, but that's unified as one plan as opposed to reacting to a number of pieces of legislation. I do have to say that I speak for myself only because I'm specifically named in the bill. And, of course, this isn't necessarily a reflection of others in the admins position. And when this bill was introduced, you had not yet been hired. Jim. It sounds like you're alluding to something more comprehensive. Is it possibly in your work plan to work with us to come back with a recommendation? Absolutely. So, I understand what you're saying about 200 different bills and we all work sometimes in silos and we have what we think is a good idea. We put it out to the table. There's a few on that wall that are definitely good ideas that haven't come out of committee yet, but we'll keep working on it. But I appreciate what you're saying and I guess that might give us more comfort if you took this and said, look, I hope to have something for you in X amount of time that we can all embrace and maybe get at multiple things rather than pass 200 pieces of legislation, which may not all go in the same direction. Yes, thank you for that. And if I may, I'd just like to walk through a bit of some of the specifics in here and to representative Leclerc's points earlier about what different stakeholders might bring to the table in these conversations. I'm glad that you raised the question. I appreciate that. So, one of the items and I'm freely going well with this tablet here. So, regarding documenting the type of force employed to effectuate a stop or during a stop, the question was raised whether or not we already collect this and why it would need to be codified in legislation. And the point, I think the answer was most likely that it's likely collected but not necessarily shared. And it's really important because there are varying degrees of use of force. And of course, as we're learning in social and mental health interactions, force can be subjective, right? Things like intimidation may not be expressly considered force under the legal definition, but absolutely impact people at their very core. So, documenting the use of force and being able to share it openly with different members of government allows us to really take a holistic view of what's happening in our state. I was surprised to speak to racial equity, basically a counterpart of mine from another state in the American south who came to Vermont for a conference and who told me that he was stopped by the troopers on the road for seemingly no reason and told me about that interaction. And because the result, you know, there ended up being no ticket or anything out of that. We don't know if experiences like that are being counted and if people who don't have access to their counterparts in government even are being recorded in these instances. So, something like that is something that I would absolutely be in favor of and would like to work with public safety on creating a strong policy on how to record that and share that. Creating not only making data available publicly, electronically, but also making it user-friendly is incredibly important because as we know, access to technology is increasingly being seen as more of a right and then a privilege, especially given the way that government now operates a lot online. So making sure that the public has access to the information through non-burdened, some non-ownerous means and media are very important. This impacts people with IDD, intellectual and developmental disabilities. This impacts people who are from low socioeconomic backgrounds who may not have had access and training with technology. And then, of course, there's use of force policy, cultural awareness and de-escalation. These are aspects of policy that are incredibly important to me and to my work making sure that we roll out policies in our state that, of course, are industry-specific and agency-specific, but that also have some degree of uniformity across those agencies. The state of Vermont is arguably the largest employer of the state and I believe that there should be some uniformity in the way that we treat our employees and the way that our employees treat members of the public. So while I recognize that the day-to-day operations of, let's say, ANR is going to be different than the day-to-day operations of the VSP, which will be different from the day-to-day operations of AHS, there should be industry-specific and profession-specific protocols. But I would very much appreciate the opportunity to work with not just public safety but all the other agencies to create some degree of uniformity in these policies so that when we talk about cross-cultural awareness, use of force, use of restraint, use of discipline or suspension or de-escalation tactics in any scenario that we're doing so consistently that's informed by the specific industry that we're talking about but that shows that the state of Vermont is treating people equitably not just across race, gender, socioeconomic lines but also throughout all of our agencies. I'll pause because I think there was a very good case. Welcome. Thank you. And I realize, and I might catch you a little flat-foot here, but could you give an example of the cross-cultural awareness that, say, a law enforcement officer might need to be aware of? Excuse me there. Potentially they're not now. I can't think of an example. Could you help me understand that? Absolutely, absolutely. In some cultures around the world it is considered impolite to make direct eye contact with a person and in our society oftentimes our law enforcement around the country take lack of eye contact as a sign of suspicion, as a sign of guilt or dishonesty. So recognizing that some cultural backgrounds might see direct eye contact as rude or confrontational might go a long way to whether or not an officer's assessment of a person's honesty or a person's account of events is credible. Another example that I can think of is that we have some cultures around the world where interaction between the sexes may be limited so that a person who identifies as male may not feel comfortable interacting directly with a female officer. So having the cultural understanding and the cultural awareness that a person may not be coming from a place of disrespect or being cagey, but rather that that person has grown up in a place with different customs could really go a long way. I mean I have very many examples, right? You know there are some folks who exhibit certain physical manifestations of nervousness, right? And I mean that's very serious because on the side of the road furtive movements could be the difference between a person dying or a person surviving the encounter. So recognizing that there might be certain cultural indicators that modify a person's behavior can really help us to navigate and control situations. Thank you. I just wanted to amplify that piece, especially my own experience not being aware of that one point I was living in a predominantly quarter of the neighborhood and interacting with kids they wouldn't look at me. So later I talked with somebody who said that children are not supposed to make eye contact with adults. It's just part of the culture. Absolutely. It's up to me to learn about the kids. I still feel very uncomfortable riding in the front seat when there's a senior person in the vehicle in the back seat because in the culture where my family comes from, Latin America, usually older folks sit in the front. So I still hesitate a bit with my mother-in-law. So you know these are all things that we may not be aware of and it's important that as our state demographic changes that we be able to adapt with it. And I just want to add I think it's not really possible to be culturally competent so we have to look at it as how do we become culturally intelligent because it's a lifelong process to learn about all these different nuances and all these different cultures. Thank you for saying that. And I think that just to reiterate that that is why it's especially important that we create policies that are introvert and that are part of a bigger push for change in the state of Vermont because as you say it is continuous work and it requires that we all be on board. So I would like to see a cultural awareness policy in AHS look very similar to a cultural awareness policy in public safety and look similar to that in Forest Parks and Rec etc. So being able to do that continuous work along all of our lines I think is very important. The other parts of the bill that you'd like to on training. I did note a comment that the representative made about the time frame and I can appreciate that comment because while I share a sense of urgency for getting this done and getting this underway I think that our country and our state are long past the time where we should still be learning for the first time about diversity so I do share a sense of urgency that I think the bill drafters had in creating this and I also want to make sure we get this right and so to the point on timeline I would like to see a little bit more time allocated to the development first of all of the working group the stakeholder list and second to the development model policy I find that when creating policies that others must adhere to it's most effective and you get most buy-in when those impacted people feel like they've had some say or at least some heads up on what that policy will look like and so it's my aim to work with the public safety community and the law enforcement community to understand their needs, their limitations, their challenges, their resources and develop something that everybody can proudly say this is what we want to sign on to I'm not going to please everyone all the time I recognize that and at the end of the day for me equity trumps preference but to the extent possible it would be nice to be able to have enough time to work through this to give it the full attention and to acknowledge the delicate nature of the topic and states that have what you would consider to be the best of policies are they rooted in the equivalent of our criminal justice training council or are they governed by more I hate to use the word generic but less focused on the law enforcement sort of background than this seems to be I would say that it's probably a combination of both but that a lot of the more successful policies have emerged from places where law enforcement has let itself take a step back and allowed others to demonstrate leadership in the process of creating model policies it takes a certain humility for a state or a locality to acknowledge the role that government plays in disparate treatment and to say we want to undo this which means we have to let go of some of the mechanisms that we've historically used that have created inequity which means oftentimes letting people from impacted communities take the lead in saying what they need as opposed to the traditional and the historical paternalistic attitude of telling people this is what's best for you and this is what we're going to do so I find that some of the best policies I've seen from other jurisdictions tend not to come from the traditional law enforcement training council type mentality but instead have baked into them the humility to allow others from other backgrounds and other professions to play a big role in creating those policies so it's not so much a fox watching the hen house as it is exposure to other perspectives yes I'd like to hear what the hens have to say and I think that that's very helpful Marcia you talked about having a little bit longer timeline in order to develop a good policy do you have suggestions on what that would be another month another couple of months it would be disingenuous for me to give you an amount of time concretely because of the scope of my mandate it's difficult sometimes for me to accurately assess how long it will take me to complete a project of this scope I can say that from the folks I've met in our different public safety departments at the local county and state level and the community leaders and the advocates and all the people who tend to walk in these circles I'm extremely confident that whatever stakeholders are engaged in this process will work diligently and quickly to get this done however I don't feel comfortable giving a time estimate I do think that more than anything we want to get this right because there are literal lives that hang on the balance on this but I appreciate the question because it forces us to think about what are our priorities as a state what are we willing to drop to pick up this important issue so much for being with us this morning thank you for continuing to be a part of this conversation I know that your time is limited thank you all for having me thank you so I noticed that we have a few of our Vermont state police folks here are either of you prepared to share some thoughts with us about the purpose of the bill the timeline on the bill or react to anything that our racial equity director wants to say I think we're just really here to listen and be present for the discussions and be helpful when the time is right great thank you alright so committee that is all we have