 Thank you all for being here, this is a one-on-one reminder everybody bringing your own chair Senator. They told me to. Just put it right there Jeanette, it's fun. No, it's alright, it's hard to get in there. There was a water all over a chair so I took the chair out and then I went to get another chair to replace it. Well, that's very nice of you. You're also, as I understand it, the decider. I guess so, I didn't know that. The three people have called me the decider this morning. Isn't that nice? What? I want to ask you a story. It's in Digger, I haven't seen it. Our Attorney General is going to present the bill, but I want to remind people that this bill is about reporting on eight crimes, and bias-motivated incidents. Do we have a go? We have a rough draft. Brynn is going to hand that out after TJ speaks a little bit about the bill, and walk us through the bill. It hasn't been introduced yet, but you can wait. Okay, hand it up. I just want to make a question because it's not just racial. It's any kind of hate incident. It includes a BGT community. It includes anti-Semitic. It includes anything of that nature. So while a lot of us have been dealing with, particularly in the Bennington area, racially-motivated incidents, this covers eight crimes and eight speech, and they found that interesting. This is from age three, and I actually went and proposed an amendment to age three, and that's the ethnic studies bill. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, reported hate crimes that were bought in 2017 of 35 hate crimes reported. 51% were based on a motivation involving racial bias, 23% were based on a motivation involving sexual orientation bias, 17% were based on motivation involving religious bias, and 9% were based on a motivation involving disability bias. So let's just be clear that we're not talking about one form of hate crime, we're talking about hate crime bias incident. We're talking about it all, and in 2019, we should all be more aware of this problem. So with that, I'd like to introduce the... Yeah. Just to ease it out. The Attorney General, the Major was walking in. We welcome the Major. Yeah, that's fine. Welcome. Good morning. Thank you for having a T.J. done in the Attorney General. Senator Sears, thank you for giving us the opportunity to introduce this bill and thank you for your opening remarks, and I couldn't agree more. The fact of the matter is, hate is pervasive in this country. And I think there's historical legacy of hate in this country, but what I think we've seen in the last couple years is that there is now a license to openly hate. Perhaps that comes from some folks down in Washington, D.C., who are in leadership of human people licensed to hate openly. Perhaps it comes with social media that it is more amplified now more than ever. And that this issue is an issue that is a top priority for me, for our office. And I want to be clear before I start that this is an important first step. My office is committed to addressing the issues of hate. My office is committed to investigating the issues of hate. But there's not going to be a single solution to the issue of racism, to sexism, to homophobia, to antisemitism. There are limits to what the criminal justice and the civil system can do. We can't arrest or sue our way to a just or respectful society. We have work to do in our communities. We have work to do in our communities. Whether it's our schools, our workplaces, our neighborhoods, this has to be part of the conversation as well. My civil rights director, Julian Thompson, is here with me today. And Julian and I have gone around this state the last couple of years talking to high school students about hate speech and civil discourse and the First Amendment. And I think both Julian and I are always so impressed with this next generation of leaders that they don't seem, in my opinion, to be as divided perhaps as others by the issues of race or religion or gender. And that gives me real hope for the future. So these are difficult issues. These are hard truths that have plagued our country since its founding, frankly. And I want to thank this committee for taking the leadership on this issue and taking this bill up, so thank you, Senator Sears. So, a few weeks earlier, we received a copy of a letter that was sent to the committee from the Fair American Institute recommending legislation that would address hate crime and bias, incident reporting, and additional training. We support these ideas. We look forward to working with you and others and a right method just right approach. You'll hear details from others on this, but we certainly agree that we all need more information regarding the issues facing our community. Senator Sears, as you said, the issue is certainly about the issue of race, but it's also about anti-Semitism and attacks on our friends in the LGBTQ community as well. Our new bias incident reporting system is designed to address that need to open the channels of communication so that we all can respond to the appropriate banner. What that means, criminal investigation and prosecution, referral to the Human Rights Commission for Civil Enforcement, or working with community stakeholders who plan to speak out against hate. I have a note last week in Burlington, there was a hate speech left on a synagogue as well as the Pride Center in Burlington. And I had a baby small who was a great leader in speaking out against hate and the Executive Director of the Pride Center. I had a rally in a march down Church Street and then they spoke on the steps of Burlington City Hall and I sent a wrap by small. I believe that I have sent this message to so many others, but this isn't exactly what you do with hate speech. You meet hate speech with more speech about love, about solidarity, about inclusion and about equality. And we think that our bias incident reporting system bringing more people into this issue, sharing information, and coming up with solutions and speaking out against hate is part of the solution. At the same time, we want to ensure that we're collecting the most useful data in the most official way. Nearly all states and the District of Columbia have some form of hate crime laws and many others have various reporting requirements. We'd like to learn from these examples on reporting to see what makes sense for us in Vermont. We've been speaking to other states about what they're doing. It's fair to say that the subject minister attracted the attention of most state agencies in the country on the issue of hate. This is a national issue. It's an issue in our state, but it's a national issue as well. We've also been in touch with some of the banner experts from places like the Simon Ways and Falls Center and the Center for Study of Hate and Extremism at Cal State University regarding data collection. Julio Thompson can provide you more detail on these outreach efforts. At the same time, we want to ensure that we're collecting information in a way that does not show free speech. Some bias incidents reported to law enforcement will fall in the area of protected speech. We want to be sure that we want to be sure that the enthusiasm for collecting information does not go too far and show for monitoring discussing matters of public aid board. We also believe that there should be more training for law enforcement and that's not just police, that's dispatchers, that's prosecutors, that's everybody in this system and I want to be clear about that and I want to start with an anecdote on the issue of training of recognizing speech. When I was in County State Attorney I got a call one night from a friend who said that two of his friends who happened to be two women of color had received flyers from the KKK at their homes and he said that they called the police and the dispatcher said there's nothing we can do for you. And we started an investigation of that case and we were able to bring the charge ultimately we lost at the Ramosa Ridge Board but the important is that we have to train everybody here to spread information, to share information and to look at it whether it's a crime, whether it's civil enforcement or whether it is protected speech and it can't stop and end at a dispatcher, it's got to go more. So we support increased training in areas of complaining, take, investigation and reporting. Currently our class teaches the hate crimes class in the Ramosa case academy this April our class will include the bias incident reporting system we at the Vermont State Police have recognized the need for more advanced training for officers with field experience as well as dispatchers who received callings we have formed a collaboration with the Vermont State Police and Lieutenant Gary Scott and Major Indra Jonas and the Vermont Law School Immigration Law Clinic with Professor Aaron Jacobson to develop a roadshow training at Vermont State Police Barracks where local law enforcement will be invited to attend. We expect to launch that later this spring and we think it will be as much a learning experience for us and hopefully we can use those lessons more in future training. We understand and share the desire for additional training and resources for that training and look forward to working with others about best practices in this area. As I said earlier there's not going to be a single solution to these issues of hate and racism and sexism and homophobia. There are limits to what the criminal justice and civil care system can do. As I said we cannot think that we can arrest or sue our way to adjust to our spectral society that this work also resides in our communities in teaching the next generation about tolerance, about love, about inclusion and equality and I do think that we're getting happening in our schools, in our neighborhoods but in inclusion, better communication and reporting will help us get a better sense of where we need to focus our efforts so we can use all the tools that are disposable to affirm our commitment and decency for all the monitors. Thank you. Thank you. Are there questions for the Attorney General? DJ, thank you very much. Thank you, sir. I think this is an extremely important issue on that. I and the members of this committee take very seriously and something that a lot of people seem to miss that you touched on. There is a difference between terminal threatening and saying something as repulsive and as ignorant and as whatever words I can think of that is hurtful and hate motivated but may not be to the level of the criminal threat and I've actually seen examples in the recent trials and tribulations in my hometown of Bennington where you know, some pretty hurtful things and having said about other people that are not I'm reminded of the dust up in Virginia reminded me of my days at UVM I never would face at UVM but I was there during the cake walk here and the I don't think anybody necessarily realized what it all meant and what we were doing but we were celebrating a winter carnival weekend and it was called walking for the cake and your mother and I were talking about that the other day because when I got there in 1962 that wasn't a big deal it was like the junior senior prom and everything else all in together and after I left in my sophomore year because I didn't like my grades for a brief period of time they just didn't like them I don't understand why but I went back and home where I lived in just to the west of Boston and I went to work in a warehouse that was operated by Zayers none of you probably remember Zayers Zayers was the precursor precursor to Walmart Walmart big stores and it was a warehouse that shipped things centrally and they didn't have enough employees they couldn't get enough in that area so they would provide buses for people who wanted to work and came from the inner city and that was my suburban kid I had been involved with a lot of Latinos because we had a fairly large population Latinos but I had never met too many people blacks and getting to work alongside those folks was an eye-opener to me so here I had just come from cakewalk to working side by side and getting to know personally and anytime you're working with somebody you get to talk about their lives what's going on so I had developed some friendships there and I took that back and I actually recognized but our innocence sometimes doesn't allow us to recognize what might be hurtful and the more we can do in schools the more we can do through efforts like this to correct that behavior the better off we all are I appreciate the effort and I want to mention any member who wants to sign on because it hasn't been introduced yet is welcome to sign on to it from this committee Senator White I also appreciate your saying that it isn't hate speech and non-civil discourse isn't just limited to racism or sexism and when you were saying that they reminded me of I think it was probably in 2003 I don't know if you know the Punney School Punney School is a very progressive liberal school and I got a call from the headmaster who said we have five or six kids here who are Republican and they are feeling completely discounted by the other students and it's gotten to the point where it was non-civil and so they had me come up and talk to the student assembly about civil discourse and how so I mean that was it was a long time ago very good remarks on this committee I just reminded my comment about black that was in 1963 now working as a color and I misspoke I as I said Julio and I I'm incredibly impressed with this next generation they do not seem to be as divided frankly as us and they seem to understand the issue of equality and inclusion and diversity at a much deeper level than our generation and that gives me great hope but we got to continue to do the work in the community to understand the scope of the problem it is all we love whether it's sexism, homophobia or anti-semitism and racism and we got to keep training on it because this issue is not going away as I said it's been here reading a great book which is about the history of our country and talks about the issue of racism being the original sin of this country and I think what we have to do when we talk about race and this is certainly what I've tried to do is embrace the conversation and it can be particularly hard for frankly white men in positions of power to embrace that conversation not to be defensive about it but to embrace it and to listen, to melody and to learn and try to bring people together but you don't want to be able to do that if you will understand the table and reflect and listen and try to make progress and that's what we're trying to do and I really appreciate your help CJ this bill is to expand your ability to investigate why it's motivated and enforce civil penalties do you feel you don't have that ability now? I'm going to defer to Julio on that senator I think he's the subject matter expert on that I appreciate the question any other questions thank you very much senator we walked through the bill and obviously like any bill there may be changes coming but if you have it sign out she's available to the committee on this there's not limit to some there's not limit to some there's not limit to some there's not limit to some there's not limit to some there's not limit to some some if we do separate the bill if you do we'll be at your point so the morning committee for the record here from Legislative Council. As you mentioned, this bill is not introduced yet. It also hasn't been approved yet. As we mentioned, we have quite a backlog in our drafting operations team, so forgive any errors. So I'll just do a quick walkthrough. Section one, this is the Civil Penalty section of law within our Injunctions Against Hate Motivated Primes chapter. So as Senator Ben pointed out, the new language of Subdivision B says that the Attorney General and the State's Attorney can investigate violations of the Injunctions Against Hate Primes chapter or the Hate Crimes chapter by using the same civil investigation methods that they use in the Consumer Protection chapter. So this provides that those investigators can investigate documents, collect documents, and those documents wouldn't be public. They would have to be kept confidential. Can I ask the question that was asked before? Is this currently one of the powers of the AG or is this establishing? So it's one of the powers of the Attorney General with respect to the Consumer Protection statutes. So it would be providing that for these types of hate related crimes, bias related crimes, they would have that same authority as they do under the Consumer Protection chapter for investigation. And again, I would like to imagine who they are going to give you some more specifics about what that means. So section two, creates a bias incident working group composed of a member from the State's attorneys and sheriffs, the Office of the Attorney General, the Association of the Chiefs of Police, the Criminal Justice Training Council from Mount State Police and the Department of Public Safety. And they're tasked with analyzing the issues that involve the uniform reporting of bias motivated incidents among all law enforcement. So they are specifically, if you look at their duties under subdivision C, they're tasked with establishing a method to standardize reporting, including how to consistently code incidents and ensure accurate data is collected and tracked and create a standardized referral system for those incidents to either appropriate law enforcement or community base into these. And then lastly, on page three, they're tasked with reporting their findings and any recommendations for legislation to the Justice Oversight Committee in December of this year. Section three of the bill, now we're moving into Title 20. This is the statute that deals with minimum training standards for law enforcement. This is suggested language that came from the Arab American Institute that would require some additional training, be a part of basic training, and that includes training on hate crimes and bias incidents. And it also requires that those trainings be approved by, in addition to the Criminal Justice Training Council, also the Attorney General. And lastly, section four on page four, requires a report from the Attorney General, an annual report starting next January that includes the number of criminal charges filed for a violation of the Hate Motivated Crimes statute and the Cross Burnal statute, including some specific information about those incidents, the number of bias motivated incidents that were referred to law enforcement from a community-based entity, and a review of the training programs that are designed to educate law enforcement about hate-motivated crimes and bias related incidents. Thank you. Yep, questions. And let's keep, I've got a whole bunch of witnesses, so keep it brief. Well this question may be better suited for somebody else then, but in terms of the composition of the, would that be a better question for somebody else around the composition of the working group? I don't know. Well I just wondered why the sheriff's association wasn't there. It's the state's attorneys and sheriffs, but the state's attorney and sheriff's department doesn't represent the sheriff's in terms of anything other than budget. So the sheriffs are excluded. So they may need to be included. Okay. Again, I circulated this with people and asked for feedback. Okay. But they're immediately needed to ask. Okay. Any other questions? Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Julio Thompson, the Chief of the Civil Rights Division, and I think... Good morning. Good morning. As you said, I'm Julio Thompson, Director of the Attorney General's Civil Rights Unit, and I testified before this committee before to talk about the five-sincident reporting system, which is basically a spill ongoing and developing network, really, from the ground up from police departments to state's attorney's offices to our office to the U.S. Attorney's Office and the Human Rights Commission and the community groups for incidents that are reported to any of us that are either criminal in nature or might violate civil laws, such as housing or employment discrimination, or that might be matters of First Amendment protected speech that community groups want to respond to. And we hope that when they do that, they're doing it in a way that's peaceful and lawful, even if it's vigorous. So I'm happy to talk about the bill first or answer any general questions that you have. Maybe just a general question about the constitutionality. Somebody commented on one of the articles about this bill, questioned the constitutionality, because you're reporting on speech. Why couldn't you report on everybody who said they hated the library? Well, I think, you know, the constitutionality of speech... or a speech-related legislation really has to do with whether it restrains or chills the exercise of speech. So right now, someone makes a complaint to police department about something they heard at a shopping center or a poster that they saw on a college bulletin board. The police department is going to write an incentive report so that they have a record of the complaint. In a lot of those cases, they don't know who the speaker is. Part of the bias since their reporting system really is to communicate that information that they've already recorded, because it could be that a state's attorney, in a given incident that might not be unlawful in itself, might be later relevant evidence if there is a crime, so that you can show a course of conduct by an individual. And part of the challenge of proving a hate crime is to show the motivation that a criminal act is motivated by bias. But if you have it and evidence for when you identify a crime and the question is whether it is motivated by bias, so there would be enhanced criminal penalties, you would want to have access to information to find out whether that individual has engaged in other bias acts, which themselves might not be unlawful, but might be relevant to proving the person's bias toward a particular person or group that was targeted. So I think when we're talking, in this bill when we're talking about collecting hate crime data or bias incident data, we do want to be careful that we are collecting data in a way so that individual's free expression is not chilled, but simply collecting or communicating information that you would ordinarily get, I don't think presents the First Amendment issue unless there's action that's directed towards speakers. Is calling somebody a Nazi a hate? Is it a crime now? No, I didn't mean a crime, I meant would this be a reportable, and I'm looking at a trail of Facebook post that you may have seen, I don't know if it was ever sent to you, obviously there's all kinds of somebody who was called a Nazi may or may not be, and may or may not hold those views, would that be a reportable? I think the idea, and this is why I think it's why working group to work on these items because that's a real one of the things that got lost in the press conference in Bennington was a person, not Max Misch, who stood up and asked some questions and had some I'm going to say that he made some comments, but people had been calling him a Nazi, and I don't know that he's housed those views but calling somebody that, and that's I guess what I don't want to be. Sure, so I think that the concept and nothing, you know, the criteria for reporting data to the legislature hasn't been said and isn't said in this bill. So that's what would be the working group's job is to determine whether something of that nature would I think that's right. I mean if we're abundant there's the things that somebody might say are. That's right, I think that, I mean the existing network that we're talking about is simply sharing communication when someone calls makes a call. So sometimes I mean someone might say I went into a town and I felt like I was being followed and I think it's because I, you know, everyone there doesn't look like me, and they make a police report. Now whether or not you call that a biases or not under our current system we would still get that because we would want to know that there's an individual who fails, even though there may not be law enforcement action taken. Well we have a president who, in my opinion, has espoused some of that when he called the group in Charlottesville, Virginia to be, you know, there's good people on both sides. That leads, I mean that's part of their motivation to my question just now. So you mentioned an enhanced penalty. Yeah. And so I'm wondering, say, two men are invited by law enforcement and they're both calling each other unacceptable names. I mean is that, and so somebody's there with their call and they record this whole thing and is that something that could be investigated as a hate-motivated speech? It might be. It might depend upon, in a hate crimes case it might depend upon what the allegations are by the victim because there might be prior contacts. Well they're fighting over the woman's and then they get to this fight and they call each other names. I mean it seems like it's just a regular little bar. But the school is not about hate crimes though. So what I'm wondering is there an enhanced penalty though? Well there is. Well there is. If you're able to prove that, but I mean state of mind is something that you have to prove in lots of cases, like a criminal fraud case. You have to show an intent to deceive. In an employment discrimination case you have to show that the failure to promote is motivated by racial bias. So you may have a case for example. And we do employment discrimination cases where it might be a pregnancy discrimination allegation where the complainant claims that the human resources manager who's also female is not accommodating the pregnancy despite the multiple requirements. So I mean we do that now. Yeah we do that now. So I mean it's difficult to find someone's motivation but you can prove it. But the evidence there, sometimes you can prove it by certain substantial evidence. The provision in here, I think there was a question about this is in section 1 talking about the enforcement provision. I just wanted to explain why that could be useful. So currently if our office or state's attorney office were investigating a hate crime allegation on the civil side to find out whether the individual would benefit from an injunction or to see it recover damages if there's property damage. Either while there is a criminal case or in cases where the prosecutor doesn't think they can prove the case beyond reasonable doubt. To do our investigation right now the only way we could get a subpoena for records would be to sue, would be to file the lawsuit. And sometimes when we do investigations we don't know who the perpetrator is and we need access to information but we don't have a subpoena power. So this basically gives us the ability to do that. We had a case a few years ago, for example, it was reporting the newspaper at a local college that someone alleged that someone had fashioned a facsimile of a news from paper towels. And they didn't know who did it and our office was looking at it, state local police had looked at it, and we didn't know who alleged perpetrator or perpetrator is for. And part of the basic information we needed was to find out who were the residents of the dormitory, what students attended classes at what time. But under federal law we couldn't get that information without a subpoena. And under our current law we don't have a subpoena and we can't go to court and sue John Lowe in order to get a subpoena. So this would give us that and it would also allow us to do during the course of our investigation. Something on Facebook, for example, would that allow you to get a subpoena to look at the computer? There may be instances where we might get, we might be able to find out what information was posted and when if there's an allegation that those things were made and were subsequently deleted. But this would allow us to basically, this statute that's referenced here gives us the authority issue would call a civil investigative demand or a CID. We use that on a daily basis in our employment discrimination cases. And it's sort of anomalous that we could issue that, we can use that discovery tool if the racial harassment occurred in the workplace. But if the racial harassment occurred in public, we wouldn't have the same authority. So it sort of fills a gap that meets them. I'm wondering about the word standards there. So again, you're talking more to methods. What would change in terms of standards and what is standard for that? So the statute that's talking about, that's referenced here, 9BSA 2460, not only says that the office can issue a subpoena, the equivalent, this civil investigative demand, but also the statute requires the Attorney General's office to keep the information that they obtain, confidential unless they have the consent of the individual providing information or it's permissible through a court order. So if you're going to court on something. Because sometimes you will introduce somebody or an individual will provide you information pursuant to that authority and you can protect it. Otherwise the concern is that the perpetrator or people who are sent back to the perpetrator could issue a public records request and obtain the contents of our investigation and that might chill reporting. That's why we have that level of confidentiality for employment cases right now. So that's the reference there to the standard. It's an obligation upon us that we have, it's not just that we may keep it confidential, we have to unless we obtain the consent of the individual. And typically when we're going to enforce things, we get that consent. If I could just ask one more. So I'm just trying to, it's hard to not put it into the context of the Bennington sequence of events. Full ahead. Okay, so the Attorney General was unable to proceed under current law. So this would give different investigation methods, standards, would, I know this is kind of an obvious question, but would the Attorney General theoretically be able to apply this $5,000 penalty even if there's not a criminal violation? And is that part of the intent of putting it into this chapter? Now I think part of this chapter, this amendment right here, is an amendment to the existing provisions that say if the Attorney General or the State's Attorney's Office find, think that they can prove by a preponderance of the evidence in the civil case that someone that committed a hate crime or that an injunction is necessary to prevent the future commission of hate crimes. Then they can use the larger provision offers three sorts of civil remedies injunctions, damages, and a state penalty, which is the $5,000 penalty. I think it's just added here because this is the next section in forward. So I'm just having a hard time realizing whether or not the Attorney General had this civil power prior to this. In other words, when the investigation was done in Bennington, could the Attorney General have gone for a civil penalty under a preponderance of the evidence? And if he could not have, is this an attempt to give him that power? If he could have, then this wouldn't have affected his decision in that case. Well, the decision out of Bennington related to many incidents. I think that the sequence was over 40 paragraphs. The great majority of those incidents, there was no identified perpetrator. So no one you could sue or no one you could arrest. So there was an allegation, for example, about someone paintballing a political sign. Don't know who did that. So couldn't prosecute that, the change in the law. From the great majority of those instances, there was no identified person. With respect to the people that were identified who made statements, they were really of two categories. One was basically racist demeaning comments calling someone racist names. And in the context of the evidence that was provided to us, that's not you can't prove either under a civil case or in a criminal case that that's a hate crime. Because offensive speech on its own is not prosecutable. It's offensive, but the First Amendment provides broad latitude for all sorts of names. Especially when you're in the context of political figures. There have been two cases before the Supreme Court where individuals were able to prove to a jury that the speech involved in a given case meant the standard for intentional infliction of emotional distress, which is a common law cause of action. In order to prove that common law cause of action, you have to show that someone engaged in outrageous and reprehensible conduct beyond what society can endure. You have to show that the person intended to cause injury to the victim and you have to show that the victim suffered damage. And in both of those cases, they worked to eat. The plaintiff, the individual who brought the claim was able to prove those elements and win substantial damages in front of the jury. And the US Supreme Court in both cases overturned it because the speech was malicious. But there were no false statements, no libelist statements and it didn't mean any of the other categories of unprotected speech such as obscenity or words that are used to incite immediate violence. It was just vile spewing of hatred toward an individual. So we have two cases. In both cases I think there were eight justices on both. One justice dissented on one case. The other case of one judge did not take part in the case. That issue is not really hotly debated within the Supreme Court. And with respect to the other statements, they didn't reach the level of a threat. They were vague and ambiguous. I think one of them referred to the word fine which doesn't really have a fixed median in context. I don't think you would be able to show either in a civil form or in a criminal form that that was prosecutable and outside the bounds of the First Amendment. What we're really talking about here with this particular amendment is allowing us to do more investigation to obtain more evidence without having to take a case to court. In some cases we might not take the court. But with this statute you gain subpoena power? Would that include subpoenaing someone for a deposition? Yes. So if the Attorney General decided to pursue the Bennington case further, and this were law, you would have the ability to subpoena people and actually put them under oath and require them to answer questions? If we had evidence that the subpoena were necessary that we had some evidence that there was a violation of the law. We can't just randomly under our existing authority, let's say in an employment discrimination case, we could subpoena witnesses or records and if they don't voluntarily come in, if they don't want to speak to us, we would have to go to court and show a court. This evidence is necessary because we have this evidence suggesting that in this case it would be a hate crime and in the employment context it would be employment discrimination. So it's not a license to go on a fishing expedition. In fact the Vermont Supreme Court has already interpreted the law of this statute of 2460 to prohibit that sort of exercise of government power because that really would be formidable and could be subject to abuse. I think the court said it. Last section 4, line 13 talks about a hate-motivated crime injunction. We're not talking about conditions of release or probation conditions. Is there a civil injunction that's ever been issued in this state based on the fact that someone was convicted of crime for this particular area? We've had cases we've had limited experience with a hate crime injunctions because typically if we have a person to identify and there's evidence of a hate crime, the relief that would be provided in a civil injunction would just typically stay away from the victim or the family or certain locations would be a condition of release. But we have had cases long ago where individuals would agree to a hate crime injunction where the prosecutor's office the hate crime may be part of a larger set of charges, in that case may be proceeding, but the prosecutor may not elect in a given case to seek a hate crime injunction. A hate crime enhancement because you recall it's a higher standard of proof to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that a criminal act was maliciously motivated. In our experience, in the discrimination context, I think the example you gave where there might be some other motive present as well, so we have a mixed motive case those are tough cases to prove even on a civil standard. But yes, we've had a few of those cases. Every time we learn of a case that is subject to a hate crime charge or there seems to be a bias element, our office already communicates with the state's attorney's office the responsible state's attorneys who are handling the case to identify what the terms or conditions of release might be. For example, in the KKK Flyers case, that's a perfect example. In that case, the individual who was arrested and charged actually never made bail and so he was incarcerated. That was a case where we were poised, if necessary, to go to the two victims and get a hate crime injunction to keep them away from them. That got thrown out by the Vermont Supreme Court? Yes, the Vermont Supreme Court said that the distribution of those flyers didn't meet the threatening standard that was in the disorderly conduct sketch. But the state's attorney in that case, Sheldon Amos got the injunction at the Supreme Court. The guy went to jail at the Supreme Court That's right. I think the state's attorney was T. J. Dunn. He was the state's attorney and I was still the attorney general's office. That was a case where it really was a gray area as to whether the circumstances there were just a distribution of the flyer that was actually sticking in the doors. In that case resulted in a descent from Justice Robinson. So it was a close decision in some respects. So how does this ability to the attorney general and the state's attorney, I may misunderstand the way investigations like this are handled, but how does this impact the local police agencies and the Vermont State Police? Does it have any impact on their ability to investigate? No, typically if the police would do, they could speak to that themselves. They would do that through the exercise of search warrants or voluntary contacts and formats. They were on online research and so forth. Anything else? I'm happy to talk about whatever you want to. No. Are there other questions? I think we'll move on, but hopefully you'll be here as we work on this bill to answer various questions. I've reminded of the U.S. Supreme Court on a five to four decision flag burning to be protected speech. Johnson versus Texas. The reason that comes to my mind is as a freshman Vermont State Senator in 1993, we had a resolution to urging, you know, Congress to overturn or somehow overturn that decision to rewrite the law. It was called flag burning resolution. There was a lot of discussion about whether that should have been protected speech or not. One of those difficult votes as a, you know, you're just first here, you know, it's the last thing on your mind when you get elected to the Vermont Senate that you were going to be asked to vote on that. And I voted to reject the resolution, which wasn't popular in a lot of my communities. But Julius Kahn said was active in that rabbi. The Republicans actually controlled the Senate back then and it was a priority of the pro 10 and some of the other members. So they were really upset when we voted it down because of the resolution that passed the House. I could just add to that after Johnson versus Texas was struck down by the Supreme Court U.S. Congress did in fact pass a federal law that was virtually identical to the Texas law. There were over 450 members of Congress who voted for it and, you know, they took some here and I think in the Senate and law professor said it would be struck down by the Supreme Court because of the ruling in Johnson versus Texas and a year and a half later in a case called Ehrlichman versus United States, the Supreme Court struck down the federal law as well. So they ultimately did pass the law which was found to be unconstitutional. Again, it was not something that I campaigned on, certainly. Thank you. Next witness is John Campbell, Executive Director of the State Attorney's of Sheriff who is a part of the working group. So happy to have you here and are you willing to be a part of this working group? Yes. Mr. Chair, we are. John Campbell for the Executive Director of the State Attorney's of Sheriff's. First of all, I'd like to thank the Attorney General for coming forward with this. This is an issue that some people call it the slam dunk, other people go, wait a second, what are you doing? And it takes a lot of courage to, especially when you're in a political position to take such a stance. But I believe very, as he does, I believe, we can't stand by as a country and let a small group of angry, warped people create this environment of anger and fear. And more importantly, we can't let them create what the norm is. Kind of what you said before back in when they did the cake walk. That was norm back here in Vermont. We didn't have that sensitivity back then. But right now, we go to this country, every play, every time we open up the paper or look at something online, it's somebody's saying making some angry statement about somebody else. And unfortunately, some of the leaders in this country have made it to be past the end and almost like this is the way to do things. This is the way to operate. This is the way to have social interaction. And I personally find that extremely offensive. I think that anything we can do as a state to try to make others aware that this is not acceptable and that is extremely important. And so even though this one section deals with whether you deal with this in a criminal or civil arena I think also part of what we should be discussing and what I hope to be discussing part of this group is how we can go out into our communities and how we can try to inform the not only our peers but the younger people of the state that this is not acceptable. So again, I fully support the bill. I believe there are things that need to be we need to sit down and talk about things and determine how best to create this whatever the reporting, what actually is biased to come up with different definitions. So there's definitely work to be done. However, I think this is a great foundation in which to build. The original state's attorneys around the state, one of the things that we've found, that I've found difficult is determining anything statewide. I mean, no matter what it is, there's cultures in various districts. I'm not talking about racially not related incidents. But how can we develop a statewide system that accurately covers these so that we're not picking on certain areas of state? I'm going to use for an example. I just got a report from the Center for Justice Research but it's the Trine Research Group that debunks the UVM racial bias reporting system. This was presented to Chief Baltusette of the Bank of Police Department. I don't know if you've seen this but it really does talk about the methodology. So it said I'll give you the conclusion. A previous study by Sagrino and Brooks on driving black and brown in Vermont was conducted using 2005-2015 data. The data issues an incorrect methodology affect the analysis conducted for the study and might make the study's conclusions questionable because the numerous causes of the study we do not consider their findings and conclusions of racial bias to be conclusive. So you have Bennington call the racist police department, etc. Based on the findings of something that a group that we use frequently here to get information about statistics and other things about Vermont crime we used in the other day on marijuana. So they're saying that methodology the damage has been done and I'm curious as to if this working, I want this working group to work obviously I would go sponsor the bill and I do appreciate the Attorney General's work here but we do need to find accurate measures for our police departments, our state's attorneys so that we don't have this kind of this is accurate or not, I don't know but it's there it's a public document I guess I don't know that it tells me that Bennington did and it seems to indicate that talk throughout about the flaws of the previous study I think many people have talked about flaws in that study before but people use that study, that's what I want to make sure it's clear is that study to claim that certain departments were bias, that had biases I mean not necessarily races for biases and if that study is inaccurate, so what I want to assure I want to be assured that this working group will work so that whatever comes up with this methodology to determine these don't have that methodology issue maybe not right now but so that's concerned because you do represent 14 diverse state's attorneys I can assure you I'm going to be the person that will be on this panel and I can assure you that I will be making sure that we don't leave any rock unturned to make sure that we're not just labeling like some people sometimes they'll throw labels out there and they stick and it can be on both sides but I think it's clear is that implicit bias is there, we all have our biases, we don't understand that now if somebody would look at the intention they read that initial report they would think that most police officers are pulling people of color over at an alarming rate and I think again Major Jonas is probably the best talk about it but I think it's an incredible job with the police and we work very closely on this bias policing but I think that there are as there is always, as Paul Hartley said, now that here's the rest of the source but I just think that again going back to what are we trying to achieve here, I think that I wish this wasn't even necessary but we are living in again when you have the President of the United States sitting up there and calling people all sorts of names, vile names and people now find that it's fair game, go ahead and just tell anybody what you think and this is not about politics, this is about an individual I don't care if you're a Republican, Democrat or Independent, it doesn't matter it's the fact that we have a person who believes in what is arguably the strongest country in the world and should be one of the most advanced countries in the world and he's up there like a petulant little child telling if he doesn't like somebody he's figuring out some nickname to call him and again it's funny when you watch it sometimes saying I can't believe you said that but unfortunately there are people who are just sucking it up and thinking that's right, he's right, he can say that and I can say in fact it's my duty to go out there and make these comments to other people and what it's resulting in I think is even to our schools or our grade schools and high schools is bullying, people don't think it's again fair game to call anybody what you want so all I can say is that any step that we take as a state in order to recognize that we have that we're made up of many different races, religions and that we all do have to get along or we all should get along. We need to be able to realize that we have to temper things we say or do and I'm hoping that when we as this group gets together I think I agree with the senator that the sheriff's probably shouldn't have a spot on this as well but I think what we get together we have to look internally and see how are the people that we represent how are we perceived and what can we do what kind of a job or what can we do to better better ourselves and in the way we look and handle crime or things in the criminal justice system and so I think we can do it. I've been doing racial training with the state's attorneys since I started back in 2016 and this actually is going to be one of the training areas this summer as well so we're doing what we can and I'm going to do anything that I can personally to to make sure to facilitate any type of programming or change that needs to be to create the feeling and the understanding that when we deal with somebody on a prosecution standpoint we're not looking at the color of their skin their religion their politics, nothing. We're looking at whether or not a criminal act was committed and what we do from there. Thank you. Any questions for John? Thank you. Do you want to briefly before we take a break Julio comment on that? Yes. About the different to making sure that we have uniform. Yes, again Julio Thompson Attorney General's Office Civil Rights Unit Director and I apologize for omitting a brief discussion about the working group report here. So the work that the Attorney General's Office has already done is a few weeks ago there was a national symposium on hate crimes among state attorneys general. It was at the Museum of Tolerance and the San Luis Info Center in Los Angeles and part of the discussion, a big part of the discussion there was about what data to collect and how to collect it to make sure it's not misleading and also to make sure that the collection methodology as well as the charge for law enforcement to report incidents isn't so burdensome that you have reduced compliance by officers who have calls to answer and cases to work. And one of the experts there was a gentleman named Dr. Brian Levin who heads the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at Cal State San Bernardino. He's testified before the Congress I think a half dozen times about hate crimes reporting. He offered us a critique about existing laws collected from different jurisdictions about collecting and reporting hate crimes data. The important thing for a lot of us there was to see whether the Senate would be willing to work with states to provide us some technical assistance and he's indicated that favorably that he'd be willing to work with some of our states and so we want to make sure we collect the data. With respect to this draft of the bill I might point out and I know this is a preliminary draft but you know when it talks, when the working group is talking about law enforcement reporting bias incidents I think part of the, maybe clarification of the bill is that talking about reporting, the police reporting crimes collecting data on crimes and I think our office, the Attorney General's office would be best situated to talk about the other incidents. If you could work with Bryn on any changes that would have been obviously we're doing early days work this is rare that we have a bill that's just in draft so we think could do the work that would save us a lot of trouble in terms of work but I would be, I really do caution us to make sure that whatever we do is uniform statewide and not with differences because in Burlington somebody looks at something differently from Montpelier or might look different from Brattleboro. Now we want to make sure the data we collect is actually useful that we can do something that will mean something and also that again it's not so onerous on law enforcement agencies to provide that information that you might have non-compliance or insurgency if there's too much detail for them. I'm Ingrid Jonas with Vermont State Police I'm a division commander in the State Police my division is the support service division and one of the areas within my division is our Fair and Partial Policing Mission and here at Scott was here earlier I was the first director of Fair and Partial Policing so he and I sort of lead our department's efforts and I know I've spoken to folks on this committee or been in a community of different forms with folks, some folks on the community regarding different aspects of our overall mission and so it's really holistic in terms of how and who you recruit and the sort of values that we put forward about our organization in terms of attracting people to our organization all the way up through policies and procedures and data collection and the other sorts of more commonly viewed things that have to do with quote unquote Fair and Partial Policing which is essentially just ethical police and constitutional police so having said that I'm really happy to have been invited to be here I don't have a really clear mission and speaking with you I want to answer questions I think in some what I want to say is that all police officers, the issue of hate motivated crimes or bias motivated incidents is incredibly important to us because we are sometimes the first ones to receive complaints of this sort and we are critically aware of the unique impact that these crimes or incidents have on victims and beyond just individual victims communities as a whole so we really need to be at the table if not leading the discussion around hate and bias motivated incidents there's also the unique factor that certain groups can feel afraid of police and we have to be very much aware of that and work to build trust in communities that are marginalized and so all agencies need to be working in that regard I would be very much in support of I should say one of my big concerns has been a lack of recognition of hate or bias motivated crime and calling it for what it is some lack of awareness in terms of properly coding these types of incidents so that they can then be recognized for what they are and so our numbers can accurately represent what it is that we're responding to in the community and so Attorney General Donovan spoke earlier about an effort that we're involved in with his office to go around to each of our barracks and speak with our members to deepen their level of understanding around calling this what it is when an incident is a crime but it's also motivated by bias or hatred we need to code it as such so we can collect active data and also be properly responsive to the community groups that we serve so there's work being done in that area and that's important for all law enforcement agencies having said that I would want us to be really thoughtful in how we go about doing this and I think the first step is a working group or whatever we want to call it so that we can really get a proper definition and good guidelines for all law enforcement and others so that we are not confused or stuck in our tracks of trying to call it what it is so we need to really deepen our understanding of what we're talking about when we talk about proper response to bias motivated crimes and incidents because there's a difference and we need to be much more articulate and clear in how we guide our members in all of our departments so I think it starts with you know collaboration and sitting at the table working together on what are we talking about here and what's the difference between calling someone a Nazi or calling somebody a racist term and what are those differences and you know I do want to point out that just from an awareness standpoint a lot of the most fear inducing sorts of things are rooted in a power imbalance right so it may be a little different to call someone a Nazi than it is to call them an anti-Jewish blur and I don't know that I could articulate that really clearly but I don't think we can take out of the fact that we can't take away from the fact that their power imbalance is oftentimes at the root of hate and bias motivated incidents and police need to be very aware of that and one thing I just can't help but say because I feel like you'll cut me off if I go on too long but I spent about 10 years prior to becoming a trooper doing gender based violence intervention talking about violence against women and children and I joined the state police to continue that work that we need to do and so it's just interesting I look back and I think I've spoken to hundreds of men not all of the men who perpetrated violence against women I would say are doing it based on bias but a lot of them will admit to you that they commit crimes because it instills fear and it maintains control and these are the kinds of things at the root of bias and hate motivated crimes any police officer you talk to who spent a good amount of time investigating gender based violent crimes might make that same argument to you effectively I probably should go back and code the hundreds of cases I've done in the state police as the bias motivation code anti-female but I didn't and so I think it's a good example of making sure that we're talking about things for what they are it's very clear to us that if there is a swastika on the side of a barn that that is a bias motivated crime of vandalism but for years and years we've seen crimes against women because they're women being not labeled as bias crimes I don't think we should have a hierarchy of tape and argue about which isn't important but I just think we all need to have a much better understanding of how these kinds of crimes impact the communities that we serve and that police really should be leading and very much a part of this discussion and getting the folks on board we're the ones who are seeing this and we're oftentimes the first ones called so I would be in support of sort of slowing things down and having a working group so we really are all on the same page but how do we define things and does the charge to the working group in this bill work for what you call crime? So I have to go back and get so creating a working group to establish a system of uniform reporting of bias motivated incidents that sounds good it sounds like it's I think I guess part of me just feels like there should be a little bit more to it to really flush it out and I might not you know I'm not somebody who writes laws but when I hear it and when it really resonates it makes sense it might be a little bit more structure to it it speaks to reporting and doesn't speak to standard so there might be a uniform system of reporting but you could have everybody adopting a different standard which would negate the work on uniform reporting to report but having people agree on what is one of these incidents so do you want on number one on line 17 it does say they should establish a method to standardize the system so do you want that expanded to put something specific in there about defining defining not just the reporting but defining the definition of what gets reported the working group needs to spend more time on that up front I believe that's true I think that's what happens and maybe this gets to what you're asking dispatchers are the first line of response when somebody calls in what they've experienced as a crime or an incident that they think could be a crime or something that they're afraid of that makes them need help so I want to make sure that dispatchers have a much clearer sense of how to properly channel these types of reports so a dispatcher could say well I know right based on my training experience that that's not a crime so it wouldn't be necessarily something that a police officer is going to respond to and result in an arrest but I don't want that dispatcher ruling out that's still something that impacts the community and has a public safety aspect to it so don't cut anyone off at the pass it's still something that needs to be responded to and the same with police officers I don't want my people or any police officer to say some well man or well sir that's not a crime so I'm done my work is done here there has to be and this is what I think the we need to be much better at is here are some other resources this doesn't meet the statute of a crime however it still has a very big impact on all of us because it impacted the community and therefore here are some other things that I'm going to suggest or lead you to so I think there has to just be a more coordinated approach and that police are oftentimes the ones in the position to help make those secure people in that direction so maybe you could work with Julio and Bryn to maybe put something in there and see if that would be acceptable to people that would be a good way to do it can that answer your question? let's define it the other thing would be it looks like a lot of reporting is going on here is that practical for police officers it sounds like a lot of things are going to have to be reporting on here I'm not sure if I have a clear answer so which section do you need? just so throughout that you're going to be do you see that some place or method just standardize the system of reporting out of consistently code you'll figure that out standardize referrals just in terms of some of the examples that were given here it sounds like there would be a lot of cases and maybe there should be that are reported with regard to some accidents that in normal day to day life we're calling each other names that wouldn't be reported it sounds like but it sounds like they would be reported and an incident would be checked it was a big incident or whether it led to something else it sounds like there would be a check mark and you'd have to enter a data point or something so we respond to lots and lots of cases every year that are calls for service almost 60,000 calls for service in 2018 not including a practice stop the vast majority of those are not crimes they're the things that people have to deal with day in and day out for which they need to answer their call or their complaint or their fear so each one of those has a report associated with it and those types of reports or calls for service can lead to felony charges and affidavits and search warrants or they can just be a paragraph that's responded to so-and-so's house because they were afraid of a sound in the night and so each one of those cases has is documented and needs to have a proper coding to indicate what exactly it was so should on this working group include the sheriff's association and the police association should there be somebody that specifically represents the dispatchers or is that too much in the weeds it might be a little bit in the weeds so in public safety we the Department of Public Safety has two of the public safety answering points but each department is responsible for their public safety answering points it's too much in them because they really are the first line of support but once it is identified then training and we're already underway with training dispatchers but that really needs to be formalized I think there was some mention before and you discussed this last month about are the systems of the Valkor and Scola are they taking the same information they are, they're two different systems that are designed to take in the same type of information they have the same codes first thing about Valkor, do you guys use Valkor? we do, I'm sorry Chief 20th, it's the Montclair Police Department there is some latitude for agencies to code certain things where the standard is what it has to do with the uniform from reporting that it has to be the same for the FBI's tracking so there is latitude, that's something that hopefully will be addressed in this working group can you give us some more? I think I've made most of the points I wanted to make but again I'm happy to answer so on page 3 it asks for the working group to report on its findings by December of 2019 we're going to spend a lot of time defining it before we start doing that, should we move that date out? probably, I would say I don't want to go on for too long, I think we want to have more updates, you're asking me, I think you should get a lot of people's opinion I think a year is probably a fair amount of time I was given pulling people together and it shouldn't go on for too long maybe July or something thank you there was just one other thing do you know how many trade unions you've been around to talking about? I don't know, it's a good question you should keep better track a lot it's kind of a regular on-go deal under different themes or topics, policy or the issue in the community some proactive, some reactive thank you you're next good morning Elizabeth Navani from the Vermont Police Association so I'm just going to briefly touch upon the actual language in the bill and Chief Acas from the Police Association is going to talk a little bit about the role of law enforcement with respect to bias, incidences, the effect on the community so in taking a look at this I was pleased to hear that the committee recognizes this is a first draft and I certainly on behalf of the Police Association will work with Julio Thompson and your brand on the language to make some suggestions and I'll just forecast where we might go with that first I'll start off with the training piece which appears on page 3 of the bill this would essentially embed mandatory training for hate crime and bias incidents, we certainly have no problem adding the hate crime piece that's an existing crime and I think we've heard from Major Jonas that we can always stand to do a better job and if you would like to include that the Police Association has no objection to adding that at this time so this incident include we would recommend you hold off on and allow the working group to first talk about what we mean when we say bias incidents so that when we finally come up with a collective understanding that this legislature has received a report on and approves that we are going to move forward with information that we can actually train to you can't commence training to something that we don't have it really put together so we would recommend that we delete that at this time and that would be something that we would add to the working groups charge any recommendations with respect to training how would you feel about two effective dates one for the rest of the bill and one that we've got you can do it that way but I think that it's possible this working group may have a number of recommendations for training around bias incidents that they might want to recommend and you can just as easily wait for them to come back to say we want to make sure these are the parameters that we include for mandatory training whatever the will is of the committee but as long as it isn't required before we actually complete the work around what bias incidents are and I think it is very possible they'll have a number of recommendations for you on training that you may want to embed in statute so returning to the original charge again we appreciate the willingness to add the Vermont Police Association and we also agree the sheriff should be added you want all of the executives for the law enforcement agencies and associations at the table this is important work so you need to have that done statewide in addition we may have some language changes around the charge of the working group which seems very focused on reporting bias motivated incidences and coding but first we have to talk about what is a bias incident as it relates to the duties of law enforcement right you could have a landlord and a tenant have a dispute tenant believing that there's a bias or discrimination in housing that may not involve law enforcement at all so we want to be very clear about what we're talking about that we would be training to and coding so that would in we would make some tinkering I think there to make sure that we're we've got a broad charge that allows us allows law enforcement to collectively meet and discuss with the attorney general's office what is a bias incident within our duties and responsibilities what are we going to code and it may not be a report maybe a referral we may be providing as part of training for dispatchers a decision making that would allow the dispatcher to do some work with someone in the other end of the line because the most effective thing we might do in that moment is make an immediate referral to the attorney general's office so it could be a combination of things but whatever it is I think what I'm hearing among all the law enforcement groups is that they want to come to the table on this they're motivated and they believe there is a place for us to do better with respect to bias incidents and to be I think it's major Jonas put it if we're the first point of contact then you know we can be a little bit more proactive if it doesn't fall within our responsibilities because it isn't a crime maybe we can make a referral as is one option and that is a way we can serve the community and I think chief bankers will speak to some other ideas so that's all I have to say I will commit to starting that work with Puglio with Bryn as soon as they're ready but I don't think it's going to be very onerous I think it'll just be some minor changes and thank you good morning good morning that's your company chief Tony Ficus from the law play your police department I just want to know everybody do you know Phil Berude from Chiffney County here represent the law police association a lot has been said that some I'll be very brief so one of the opportunities for also law enforcement will be specifically in our communities there is an instance of even bias which we're not sure yet if it hits the marketing a hate crime or not but it's a time can be very sensitive to that victim population and how law enforcement responds and how to that can also set the tone for what's happening in the community because these situations can also deeply divide and challenge any community so again VPA is absolutely committed to supporting the working group and really defining what we want to accomplish because also I think there's a natural sensitivity on this conversation as well that we're not just collecting data on protected speech and certainly there's a lot of other type of situations that maybe aren't necessarily for this group but from the example is twice I've had to protect the Westboro Baptist Church in my career here and there's nothing there's no you know some of the top hate filled groups out there but is that situation it's really that we are protecting them so they can effectively exercise their first amendment right with that you know so how does that get tracked so that's where it's a lot of work to be done within the working group and again the VPA is fully committed so again I also the other things where it doesn't just fit in one bucket or another in other words is it a hate crime or not do we track it or not but sometimes also I think a lot of this is put upon law enforcement to also take a lead in the community and that can also be in the forum of working with community justice centers forums, town hall type formats to ensure that we the very least castle light on some some you know problem areas especially with anybody is feeling afraid to conform this goes to the heart of what we're trying to do to build our trust and legitimacy in terms of policing organizations so there's a lot of other things I think law enforcement can do and I think that and I think I made your Jonas kind of touched upon that that we always can do more to bring our communities together and these aren't new concepts so Robert Peele believed this back in the 1800s and 1919 principles so but it's something we need to be careful of because these can be extremely sensitive to victims about whether they are comfortable to reporting whether it's culture whether it's how they may be identified in the public so there's a lot of considerations here and also again what is there's a lot of resources and how do we best leverage the resources for the victim from the rights commission, Attorney General's office and even the United States Attorney's office so it's it's an important topic and it's something that I think law enforcement absolutely has to be heavily engaged in our communities with and we do need some standardization when it looks like because we also know too it can be hurting cats from what individual agencies do whether they're county, state equal, local so we certainly welcome that again all of that will be you know made clear through the work through the working group I just wondering how do you see this when you think about the internet and Facebook and horrible things that are said to people in that venue and how is that social media is incredibly difficult we certainly follow up with threat assessment whether it's bias motivated or direct threat of other and sometimes that involves resources in other states and of course the FBI also we report to the FBI and they're also tracking hate crimes here so sometimes you can't take action sometimes you know individual platforms, social media platforms may have a regulatory process where they could block people these sort of things but again when is it free speech and when other other elements that need further investigation this can be similar to a counterterrorism investigation there might be certain ideologies that are put out there in social media, freedom of speech but when is there a totality of that speech and other acts and further it's physical evidence that maybe this person is intended to harm that is the responsibility that's coming upon the law enforcement agencies to investigate fully what are the next and appropriate steps and there is a challenge with all of this is that there's not one size fits all and we have to be very careful not to be so clear in how we define X or Y has to move forward with this but it is important that we still move forward with this it was like that's tricky to report reporting those calls about that deadline question I think it's also important glad that the law enforcement is out there in communities and talking about it and stuff because there's a lot of misunderstanding out in the community that likes to dump on and blame law enforcement not doing and for perpetrating bias and I was at a forum once where Lieutenant Scott was there and he was giving all the statistics for the state police somebody insisted that there was this horrible incident in the state police work and it was from 2011 you couldn't drop it because the tape was already there so I'm really happy that most of law enforcement is out there being proactive do you think it's doable to get all this wrapped up in? I do but again I think we just have to certainly be very cautious because there are some pitfalls, you know some conversations you can go as far as this could be a modern day of apartheism but we've got to be very careful that we also protect the first amendment so do you agree with extending the date a little bit for the report to come back and the issue around the training? yes I think it should be a sufficient amount of time but we shouldn't let it go so far out that we kind of lost sight of the target but again the training, we're not anywhere near ready to talk about the training piece until we have clearly defined what is the standard and what are we training to but also be a gatekeeper and maybe shouldn't be a gatekeeper but how we also train our dispatchers well if we put the working groups term out and we put out the training piece by the year it seems like we're maybe on the timeline that it should be on I'm sure it wouldn't be the first time if they have new issues come up that require more time I'm sure it will be an opportunity to come back to the legislature and say this is where we're at, this is what we need could you just mention criminal threatening in what film it is, not in the context of anything for example if there's threats because for example there could be threats to politicians based on how they voted or their positions on gun bills we get those, how to ban issues and those still require being looked at you might be good and the same thing if somebody says they're going to really focus on our schools, on public school safety, threat assessment is a piece of how we protect our schools so at the earliest opportunity for intervention we make contact and it's the same thing that the FBI and we do in the realm of 24 terrorism and the challenge is we don't know how many times reaching out to somebody, an opportunity to intervene we don't track that but certainly we can tell you how many shootings and terrorist attacks we've had and that's always a challenge with this and I see the same challenges how to report that out and track that with potentially the outcome of what this is working for but it doesn't mean we don't fight or check for schools it doesn't mean we don't try to stop terrorist attacks from occurring thank you so Elizabeth Novati for the police association on the question of training I noticed actually the director got here it's here but two things to keep in mind about training, whatever you decide first the working group has to decide what its recommends are around training there will be training on vice incident but what that is won't be established until they finish their work but the part two of that is you have to allow the academy sufficient time to put together then the training in response to whatever has been produced the second piece, there is language in the bill and something that we can revisit that requires the attorney general's approval for training I just want to note that if the bill is suggesting that it has to be approved by the training council the attorney general actually is a member of the training council so the attorney general's office would be part of the body that would be approving the training so it may appear to be a little redundant but he will certainly have a voice at that training council and I would say it's a very collaborative group so I don't imagine that there will be anything but a scent to where it comes out so next Peggy we have there are three people coming up that we need to get in here we're going to call her this is a different person than we heard from before I think it's Kaias the person who went to hear from her this is Kai Wiggins, Kai Wiggins, yeah the policy analyst would be at an American institute would you like to give us something from him? hi can we speak to Kai Wiggins please? can I have a second hi hi is this Kai Wiggins? good so this is the Andremont senate judiciary committee there's four or five of us here and a lot of other people in the room listening from various police departments and our chair of our committee is just returning from the meeting so we'll take over and we look forward to hearing from you so can you hear me okay? we can now yes okay excellent thank you for giving me a sense of the room and I'm going to start whenever you are ready thank you thank you for once again having a speak on this important issue I'm Kai Wiggins and I'm a policy analyst at the Arab American institute last month we had the opportunity to appoint this committee with our work on hate crime prevention we also provided two recommendations for legislation that would promote an improved response to hate crime and bias incidents in the state of Vermont before I revisit those recommendations I will first reacquaint this committee with the work of AAI as a national civil rights organization founded in 1985 AAI promotes the political and civic empowerment of Arab Americans and supports similar efforts of other communities across the United States as recent high profile cases of persistent racial harassment in Vermont have shown bias incidents can disrupt the democratic process and intimidate individuals and their communities from participating in political and civic affairs when these incidents rise to the level of criminal activity and therefore become what we call hate crimes the effects can be even more damaging beginning in 2017 and in response to a nationwide report of hate crime incidents AAI conducted a comprehensive study of laws and policies designed to prevent and address hate crime in each state in the district of Columbia the findings of which we published in 2018 report since then we have continued our research into the quality and accuracy of government hate crime data and with the 116th congress in nearly all state legislatures now in session we are also tracking legislation related to hate crime in most states later this year we will publish an updated hate crime index based on this continued research last week we received draft legislation from the office of legislative council relating to hate crime and bias incidents in the state of Vermont as proposed the legislation would expand the authority of the attorney general to investigate bias motivated incidents and enforce simple penalties create a working group to establish a system of uniform reporting of bias motivated incidents require minimum training standards for law enforcement officers to include trainings on hate crimes and bias incidents and require the attorney general to report handings to the general assembly on hate crimes and bias incidents we are encouraged with the draft legislation as proposed but we recommend this committee to consider two potential improvements first the legislation should require law enforcement agencies to report hate crimes to the Vermont crime information center through the uniform report specified in 20 BSA section 2054 second the legislation should ensure a stakeholder participation in the process by which the Vermont criminal justice training council and attorney general approve the hate crime and bias incident training required under section 3 of the draft legislation regarding the first recommendation the legislation as proposed creates an innovative and promising framework for improving the reporting of bias motivated incidents in Vermont the committee could strengthen this legislation provisions requiring law enforcement reporting of hate crimes through the uniform crime reports or UCR system as this data repository for crime reporting the VCIC collects UCR data from law enforcement agencies through the national incident based reporting system or NIVORS the data is the federal review of investigation national hate crime data are collected through the UCR system whether through NIVORS or the traditional summary reporting system under the hate crime statistics act while participation in the UCR is voluntary 23 states have laws reform law enforcement reporting and data collection of hate crimes in draft legislation we submitted to the office of legislative council following last month's meeting law enforcement agencies would be required to report hate crimes to the VCIC in the form of uniform reports specified in 20 BSA section 2054 the VCIC would in turn be required to submit an annual report to the attorney general based on the information contained in the uniform reports received under the section with the first creation of a bias incident working group this committee has taken important steps for improving the reporting of bias motivated incidents in Vermont we recommend the committee get a head start and strengthen legislation which requires for hate crime reporting regarding the second recommendation the legislation as proposed incorporates hate crime and bias incident training which must be approved by the VCJTC and attorney general into the criteria for all minimum training standards under 20 BSA section 2358 the addition of these requirements is critical and has their utmost support the committee could strengthen this legislation with provisions ensuring stakeholder participation in the development approval of the required training a potential approach rest in the creation of a working group like that proposed in H3 this bill would create an ethnic and social equity advisory working group which would consist of eight members from specific communities identified in the legislation communities that are especially vulnerable to hate crime and bias incidents have a state in the training that law enforcement received to ensure their safety that many victims choose not to report hate crimes because of fear or distress of law enforcement further substantiates this point when it comes to hate crime and bias incident training for law enforcement this committee should strive to create a framework that ensures stakeholders have a seat at the table I appreciate the opportunity to share these recommendations and I commend this committee for working to improve the response to hate crime and bias incidents in Vermont thank you thank you are there any questions no it's very thorough I appreciate that can you talk just a little bit about the other states and what they're doing is this have they been in law or are they just starting it same as we are reporting or training so the state level efforts on hate crime reporting predate the hate crime statistics act which was passed by congress in 1990 in 1981 Maryland was the first state to pass legislation requiring some sort of reporting and data collection on bias motivated incidents under you know these statutes pretty much was implied but what is explicitly directed is that law enforcement should report hate crimes through the UCR program and typically in most states other than Mississippi there is a centralized repository that is designated as a state UCR program and that program is responsible for forwarding the data collected from law enforcement agencies to the FBI national UCR program in the state of Vermont the VCIC is responsible for that well actually my question is more towards you're going to need to report later this year on a hate crimes index based on the continued research and I'm trying to understand how we will use Vermont data it would be the hate crimes that have actually been reported right through the hate crimes so we base our research the hate crime index will consist of a study of as I mentioned laws and policies in place in each state designed to respond to or prevent hate crime and we also consider data that are collected through the UCR program so we'll be considering the I believe 34 incidents that were reported through the UCR program from law enforcement agencies to the VCIC and then up to the FBI and published in the FBI's annual hate crime statistics which came out in November 2018 and we'll also be considering the Vermont crime online reporting platform which the VCIC keeps regularly updated because sometimes it is the case that agencies submit hate crimes through the system after the publication deadline or cutoff to be included in the federal statistics and as I said 23 states have laws explicitly required hate crime reporting and data collection through these systems. Thank you very much. Other questions? Thanks so much for joining us. Appreciate your and as we continue to update the bill we'll try to keep in touch with you so you're aware of some of the changes we may propose. Absolutely thank you Chairman Sears and I appreciate that. I will also mention and I know she was invited to speak today but she was unable we have been working with Tabitha Pulmore at the Rutland area branch of the NAACP on this effort and I thought I mentioned that as well so we're in consistent correspondence with her to update some of this legislation. When we take the bill up again we may have an opportunity to hear from her as well. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you to everyone on the committee. Next is the person who has to put all this into training. Rick Goughy Does this bill add to your written testimony? I think you really was everybody on the committee. So essentially for the record Rick Goughy is the criminal justice training council. I submitted this like yesterday so you may not you may not have had an opportunity to read it. Essentially we're looking forward to participating in the working group. I think that it's a good idea. We think it will prove very useful and certainly addresses the need that we identified through various sources and incidents in the state. The had a couple of concerns. The primary concern was that tying the attorney general to the approval process for training given that the attorney general is already a member of the council in fact creates redundancy and also kind of establishes the attorney general as a better term of super member able to veto the rest of the entire council with us. So we did have some concerns about that. We just wanted to make sure that that was at least put on parable. We wanted to make sure that it was a use of the term pressure course in the draft and what we would suggest is that we actually refer to the term training outcomes because that will give an opportunity for the committee to decide what we want officers to learn along with what they'll be trained on and then you get an inservice here as you know doing every odd number of years beginning this year. And we put out a couple of examples and certainly not looking to get that specific in the draft but just kind of talking points and thinking points about what training outcomes would look like as opposed to mandating a number of hours and then which we have to kind of wedge trainings. And finally to address Senator Sears' initial comment yes this does increase my workflow which is fine we can hit the program. There's a couple things that I like to make a committee where the council has a fair and impartial policing subcommittee that is tasked with identifying the work they train, developing instructors making recommendations to the council for training and currently we're at five members we're going to be looking to expand that to 11 to kind of emulate the training advisory committee and the domestic violence committees. Currently we have the NAACP, the BSP we would anticipate that when we expand it we'll start to see more applications from other members of the community. And then that committee would be as I mentioned tasked with developing trainings but also doing reviews of basic training curriculums to ensure that we're staying on top of best practices, staying current with developments in the field from police training. This is because it's a mandated training but really you're not just like domestic violence and there are other specific topics with mandated trainings like a pair of operation canine. Generally we have a trained coordinator assigned to this and on the second page of this document I provided what I provided the House of Proper Nations a couple of weeks about regards to what the duties of this particular position would be. And as you see it goes significantly beyond just training. It includes liaison duties with free and impartial policing groups It manages the free and impartial policing subcommittee It acts as a council representative from a number of citizen groups. I would anticipate this individual coming out here to testify in these efforts if one needed. It also assists in managing both the full time to level three and the part time to level two classes. And very importantly responsible for developing that cadre of instructors that we have to have in order to provide in-service training to every law enforcement service that we have. We have firearm instructors, we have domestic violence instructors This would fall into that same category. One or two people along the academy cannot provide this training to law enforcement in any given year. And that's the whole content of our letter. I don't know if you were here when both major Jonas and police chief Michael and Elizabeth testified about instead of including on page three there bias incident training as required to add that as a more specific thing to the working groups to the duties of the working group to come up with both what it is and then recommendations for training and putting that in there so that would come back as part of the report and the training wouldn't be required then until after you know what it was. And we have talked with about incorporating some of that into the basic training and we'll start this session. So we'll begin introducing that at the level three and the level two training but certainly expanding on that and making it clear would be a vocal And you're recommending taking up the attorney general on line eight and seventeen because he's already part of the training council? Yes. And we lean pretty heavily on the ATG's office to come to these issues. I do have one question. We all we keep here and I may be really confused here which my committee members won't find unusual but the racial disparity panel is what was set up to be the to look at racial disparity and systemic racism in the criminal justice system. Is that right? That's the group that ATON is now the chair of. So what is the AG's task force? Is that different because we keep hearing about the AG's task force on racial justice. Is that a different group or is that it is a different group? Who is that? I don't know. Okay. All right. I guess I'm going to ask the AG what that is. Okay. Thank you. All right. We look forward to working on your budget requests. When your time comes before the appropriations committee. I think I know the person in charge of your budget in the appropriations committee and I'll talk to them about it. Okay. I will have it. That be me actually. I know. That's why I said would you talk to them. Next is Chloe White from the ACLU. Good morning. This is my first Chloe White ACLU. This is my first time testifying for all this year. I'm pleased to be with you. Thank you. I would never purposefully do that. I wanted to thank you all for giving us the opportunity to comment on this draft bill. Despite important gains, we're reminded each day that racism and bigotry remain embedded in the fabric of our democracy and in our state. So we support the bill's intent when it comes to battling these injustices and ensuring Vermont is a welcoming and inclusive place for all. So we do have questions or concerns regarding this legislation however. So regarding the investigatory powers under this bill, the Attorney General's office would have the power to investigate discrimination and hate motivated crimes just as the office or state attorney has the power to investigate unfair acts and commerce under nine states as a section 2460. And according to that section of the statute, whenever the AGO has reasons to believe any person to be in violation of consumer protection law, they may examine or cause to be examined any books, records, papers, memoranda, and physical objects bearing on the alleged violations. And while such broad authority may be reasonable in the area of unfair commercial acts, we find the grant of similar authority when it comes to possible private, constitutionally protected speech, whether hate motivated or discriminatory conduct problematic. In the criminal context, a warrant would be required to demand and obtain such records. And while the standard may be lower in the civil context, we're concerned about allowing such intrusive searches merely due to the reason to believe the violation of chapters 31 or 33 is heard. So we would urge the committee to consider how to ensure due process rights are respected, even in the context of a civil investigation. So I would urge you all to look at that. Similarly to the American Institute, we also note that the membership of the bias incident working group created in section two consists solely of members of law enforcement. So we would urge the committee to add other non-law enforcement members to this body to ensure that the group is inclusive of different views and perspectives. My only other thing that I just want to add after hearing Mr. Gaffier is about the attorney general's office, both being on the council and having the criminal rights, I believe that's almost the same setup as FIP, whereas wherein the criminal training council needs to look at FIP but also fair and impartial policing and also the attorney general's office must be the one to say whether an FIP policy is in line with ours model policy or not. So I think there is precedent I'm not commenting one way or the other whether to take them out or not, but they, you know, that I think other groups have brought that up actually almost as a conflict of interest, whether you all in the context of fair and impartial policing. Okay. So thank you all. Do you have any questions? I'm a little confused by your in the... I do want to know, I had an older version of the bill, I didn't receive the new version of the bill this morning so my numbers may be off. Yeah, and we're still at the draft stage, we apologize for that. Oh, no, no, no. Well, it's unusual that we're dealing with drafts and not a bill that's introduced. I'm trying to understand your concern about the authority to get a subpoena. Is that your concern with the speech? I mean, somebody says no matter how biased and ignorant or whatever term you want to use for it says some vulgar things about somebody based upon their sexual orientation, race or whatever. You're concerned that granting the broad authority to get a subpoena to look at their computer or whatever else out of that, you know, are they the ones who put out the news, for example? Is that what your concern is? Because it basically is protected speech no matter how vulgar or how repulsive it is. Right. Well, I think we within the statute it says if the Attorney General has reason to believe that a violation has occurred, they can look at books, memoranda, and so on. So I think that if there is a subpoena process whereby they have to go to a court to ask for this, that is more of a granted due process that we would appreciate. I can speak to that actually. Yeah, and I apologize. Julio brought up during Julio Thompson's testimony, he brought up the news. So let's take that. That is a hateful symbol that was produced, but who's responsible for the news and how do law enforcement or the Attorney General investigate who's responsible for the news? And is that what your concern is? Our concern is you know... Maybe I'm not understanding your... Sure, and I apologize if I'm not frank, and I apologize too. I wasn't able to fit into the room when Julio was speaking, so he may have addressed this. I think, you know, because the statute right now, under 9 BSA, Section 2460 says that when the Attorney General has a reason to believe a violation of right now it's unclear as to how much it has occurred, they are able to obtain these books, papers, and memoranda bearing on the alleged violations. We would hope that there would be some sort of due process involved in how those books, memoranda, and so on are obtained. If this were a criminal investigation there would have to be a warrant to obtain what's on someone's bookshelf, or do they have the anarchist cookbook or something like that. We would want to ensure that there are due process protections here. And if there is a subpoena whereby the court needs to approve it, that is better due process, but I think ensuring that it's not just Attorney General saying, we have reason to believe that this person is bad, so we're just going to go into their house and grab anything, grab their computer. So having some sort of due process protection around that, just ensuring it's there would I think would be helpful. Are there other questions about that? That helps me understand the point of view. Maybe Julio could I would appreciate that. If you might respond to that and perhaps to the comments from Mr. Gaffier about the Attorney General being a super member of the group. Thank you, Chloe. So the civil investigative demand, that's what's referenced in 9DSA 2460, is essentially the equivalent of a subpoena. It is the tool that our office has used for probably 20 years in connection with cases of employment discrimination, and that authority extends not only to employers but if we have reason to believe that there's a witness who has evidence then we can issue a CID on those individuals as well. The way the process works is that a person has served one of those and doesn't want to comply, then we have to go to court and get a court order to compel them to comply with us. The burden isn't upon the individual to seek a protective order in court, the burden is on our office to go to court and seek an order. In order to do that we would have to provide the court, typically through affidavits, sometimes with exhibits, and if some of the materials are confidential they may be filed under seal, because we may not want the target to know what evidence we have against him or her. So there is a due process mechanism that's built in it, and we refer to it because it's a tool that we've been using in our office for almost two decades now and we haven't had any issues. Leonard? I was speaking a little bit about this at the break. I do think it's an expansion of the power and one worth thinking through and I hear what you're saying which is that ultimately a subpoena or a court intervention might be necessary if the subject refused but the reason for going to it in this language would be to produce cooperation and majority of cases because they would just be told that they have to give us these documents and might not know that they have the right to go to court or just might be afraid once they receive the CIV as you called it that they now have to comply. So I guess it does put a lot of power in the hands of the attorney general in terms of investigative authorities am I a paranoid that it might not just apply to one person but that it might apply to in the Bennington case there were a number of people who were involved and there were questions about who was telling the truth so might the attorney general under some circumstance use these CIDs on multiple people to try to figure out what's going on. We would to begin with before we would issue a CID and indeed before we would initiate a hate crimes investigation where we would engage in that we would have to identify conduct that we believe violates the law that violates the civil standard so if there is a case where someone is engaging in expression that is reported to us and someone's complaining of it and if it's our assessment that that's protected speech we're not going to use the CID authority because the standard we approach when we exercise it let's say in the employment context because the person could be alleging a hate crime and it could be coming from a co-worker so we already have that CID authority and if we're going to investigate it we have to have some reason to believe that there is a violation of the law that we can identify and it is a common place for us for people to come to our office ask us to initiate an investigation and say for example I want my supervisor to be investigated because he made a remark about how I looked in a particular outfit and if that's the only comment and those are the only circumstances that's a case we don't open an investigation in because our standard is could we articulate to a judge we have reason to believe that person may provide us information under oath that there's something that of true violates the law and when we do issue a charge or a charge of discrimination that's signed under oath the standard always is saying if a person we serve a charge on and say please respond to these allegations our operative assumption is if they say no can we get a court order so that's a routine that your point earlier about people willing to be cooperative but being maybe precluded from providing information unless they're served with a subpoena yet that is common and we do that in an employment context it could be for example that information where we're investigating alleged discrimination in the schools among faculty and there may be contractual provisions or state law provisions or federal laws that include our office from investigating a case of sexual or racial harassment unless we have certain records and we serve them with the CID and I take your point about the standard office in real life with the CID and as the AG I credit them because I know him, I know you, I know how your office is functioned I'm speaking maybe more generally to the powers that would give anybody in that office going forward it's a broader authority so that's my not saying that I oppose it but it's something to think about because it's been a limited communist context now we're going out into any place where somebody alleges that a bias incident has occurred I wouldn't say any place for example if someone alleges housing discrimination we don't have a legal authority if the conduct is not a crime we don't have a legal authority to do that so we refer to those cases either to HUD through the US attorney's office or to the human rights but I mean on any street anywhere state one of these incidents could occur we would have to have a basis in this context we're saying the allegations are true the evidence is pointing towards the commission of a crime that's motivated by bias in the same way that we do right now where we say that this is a failure to hire somebody because of her gender or sexual orientation just for context I mean we've had the CID authority I think since I think the one case on the subject there was a earlier version of the law was Jerome Diamond was the attorney general so it goes way back just for context in terms of the complaints that come into us in the employment context that we investigate calls for assistance we probably received between 800 and 1200 a year but current statistics on him but it's always near the thousands and I would say at any given time we have our open case in that inventory is probably 90 to 120 cases employment discrimination and that ranges from family leave to the right to pump breast milk at the workplace to equal pay to workers compensation, retaliation, drug testing violations and so forth so we certainly should not investigate as many cases as people ask us to and the standard always is you know we assume if the person we're going to ask to provide information if they said no could we get a court order and if not we might ask for voluntary compliance if they won't give it to us and we wouldn't issue a CID we would wait until we got more evidence Senator Benning had a question I do if I had a nickel for every individual that I've seen pulled over on the roadside and the police officer says do you mind stepping out of the car and what flows from that simple request this concept of expanding CID has me somewhat walking cautiously there is a tendency to react in the heat of a given moment to creating legislation but there's also once legislation is created a tendency on behalf of some to react in a given heated scenario to use these tools quite aggressively and I'm a little bit concerned I'm all in favor of a working group establishing parameters all in favor of a system that is not resulting in disparate application throughout the state I'm a little nervous when it comes to expanding this particular tool because now you're on the path of a criminal act not a civil violation and if you have a situation where somebody is obviously the target and I could use names but probably shouldn't for the Bennington situation but if there's somebody that's an obvious target and they say they're not doing anything other than free speech and you use that subpoena to go in and they say hey check anything you want and then all of a sudden you're looking at child porn on the computer that's a whole other animal and I want to walk through this very carefully thank you in the consumer context when our consumer protection unit has a lot of commercial practices sometimes if they are asking let's say there's an allegation of fraudulent that could be fraud in connection with any kind of commercial scheme or could be cramming on phone bills sometimes when the party resists a CID the alternative sometimes the decision is they'll just they'll just sue them they'll just file a lawsuit and issue a rule 45 subpoena the same provision so the risk of the abuse of legal process by someone who's not willing to follow the rules the letter of the spirit of the law exists in connection with any case where anyone under state law has the ability to file a lawsuit so I mean sometimes that's a question that is encountered whenever anyone is issuing a CID would it be more efficient that our use of resources just to file a lawsuit now the value of the CID that is provided where that the lawsuit does not provide where I identified a gap is where you don't have a person to sue so you're making an effort to try to find the perpetrator so in the news case for example trying to find who the perpetrator is and we have records that someone's willing to provide to us that might help us identify that person so I mean that's the notion I totally understand that and if the committee is not interested in conferring that power now I would urge upon the committee to consider at least something in this bill that provides confidentiality for complaints that are brought to us under that statute a concern that we and 9BSA 2460 has that confidentiality provision so if we don't enjoy the confidentiality provision from 2460 then I think there should be some alternative a concern that we would have is that as we increase and encourage recording and communicating between agencies a concern we have is that potential targets or allies of people who we might be investigating would simply issue a public records request to our office and then have the contents of our files which they might use either to avoid prosecution or harass or perhaps reach out to witnesses so I think confidentiality of that information is important it's embedded within 2460 so if 2460 isn't there something else should be. The Bennington cases come up several times here obviously I'm not familiar with a lot of it but I don't remember much more than one or two people involved at least in the Attorney General's investigation there. The numbers are relatively small I believe. We're not sure about some and would this allow us to find them? Well in that case based upon the speech activity I mean there was some activity when you were not you feel comfortable calling it speech like the allegation about as plastic as on trees there was nobody identified with in connection with that there was nobody you could subpoena sue or prosecute service search warrant on but in the instances I think in the Attorney General's report where he refers to speech the conclusion of the office was that that's constitutional protected with speech so the Attorney General's office currently has civil hate crime authority regardless of this bill that has existed since 1999. Were there several? That's my point. You wouldn't have to identify a crime or something that would satisfy the statute and we did not. I was going back to your reference to the fact that there was one person who was being investigated he was accusing someone else of having so there was a back and forth in terms of accusations of violence but in terms of the individuals as I read the investigation there were allegations of certain things that happened we don't know who the individuals were accusing. That's right I mean our office's charge in that case was to review the investigation that was already conducted some of the events that were identified reports regarding people in the cemetery the like it happened several years earlier our charge wasn't to start from the beginning of our candidacy in the community at large to find out who was in the cemetery in 2016 that wasn't our charge you know in that case where we're talking about and there were allegations or claims or certainly people were asking why we didn't charge people with crimes it was our conclusion in that case that again the evidence that we provided that we reviewed didn't meet an underlying crime and therefore we couldn't prosecute it civilly or criminally under either standard of proof because it seemed to us that it was within a realm of protected speech so there's a case where at least in one instance maybe two instances we knew individuals and we had the authority currently to just sue them under the law and we chose not to do that because our assessment was that that was protected as deeply offensive and abhorrent as it was it was still constitutional protection. That's an important distinction that was passed on many that the conclusion of the attorney general's office was that it was a protected speech and no matter how repugnant it was that's the conclusion that was drawn and I believe that there are some who are saying well why can't we make that a crime as I said earlier Mr. Chairman some of the speech is so deeply offensive that it would meet the standard for this very difficult legal claim of intentional infliction of emotional distress and I mentioned there were two supreme court cases one was against the Westboro Baptist Church. Regarding a protest at the funeral of the plaintiff's son who died in Iraq that went to state court and resulted in multi-million dollar damages against the church that the supreme court subsequently reversed because the speech concerned though the father was a private citizen the speech concerned matters of public concern which had to do with America's involvement in a military and other public issues and you know that was deeply hurtful offensive speech and that and the court pointed out that that particular group the defendants in that case had been using that tactic for 20 years and yet the speech involved in that case was constitutional. We go to the weeds in this committee which frequently talk about getting into the weeds of the different bills and in this bill a couple of witnesses have brought up the working group and the membership of that group and that there are maybe there should be other groups or other persons or representatives from other groups involved in the working group and the second was brought up by the HLU about the Attorney General being the super member of the actually it was brought up by the let me blame the right people. With respect to the membership of the group I'm not the most knowledgeable person about the criminal justice training council I know the Attorney General's office has a representative on that that's assistant attorney general David Sher. I believe the criminal justice training council has a public participation component to it I'm not sure what the details of that are I know for example with respect to the fair and partial policing policy that was working through the council members of the VC JTC one of whom is still here behind me spent many days discussing that with migrant justice in the ACLU so I'm not sure what's formally in the process for that with respect to the AG's office having approval of that of the training I don't know that I have an opinion on the subject I think the distinction between the fair and partial policing law where the Attorney General has to certify compliance of the policies for the agency where Mon has 70 to 80 agencies and the role of the AG in that statute is not to evaluate the training council it just has one vote on the council but to evaluate the policies that are out in the public and the agencies for compliance so I think that's a distinction but I don't think you know this is above my paper but I don't think our office has a real concern about whether we remember or not I've been teaching the hate crimes class at the police academy since 2009 I think there's April it's going to be my 19th to 20th class I don't know what the existing law is I think it's that the Attorney General approves or supervises the training or something like that but frankly we do we write the power points and we deliver it we provide it to the council to get feedback so I think that system's going to be well and I think they would need to have any special Are there other questions before we release the witness? Thank you for hanging in there Bryn, could you and you're welcome to stay right in your chair There were a couple of suggestions from Andrew Jonas I forget her title Major, sorry with regard to standard and what that means Bryn hurt those I think the first question for us is do we want to mark up the draft and then introduce a bill after we've marked it up or do we want to introduce the draft and then mark up a bill because of the unique situation here we could have a bill that pretty much has been developed by us and actually could be looked at by say the operations committee Do you want my opinion? I think we should the suggestions that have come so far have been pretty structural kinds of suggestions and I think that we should just put them into the draft so that when people comment on it they're commenting on where if we decide to go there they're commenting on where we've already decided to go instead of having to repeat all those suggestions so we will unfortunately senator benningin I didn't hear all the testimony but I'm sure you have Bryn hurt it I think I have a good idea of the suggestions that were made by all the witnesses I think what I can do and what I've already started to do is put together a draft incorporating the suggestions that I thought were well received by the committee and what I can do is put in some sort of indication about who suggested what and then that way I can circulate it to you all and you can decide which changes you'd like to make and which you would not and I think there was some suggestion to have around the wording of defining it to have Elizabeth work with you around the language with regard to splitting that up the bias a different date different effective date I wasn't sure if that is what the committee wanted to do if you wanted to just take out the bias I would like to do both I would like to make the effective date six months later I would like to take on bias training bias incident training out of that section altogether and put it in one of the duties of the working group to come up with what is bias incident training and what are the parameters well I guess my reason for suggesting representatives all agreeing to send it away no I would see that they would in other words I think if we're going to do this we should be requiring that bias incident go into the training if we take it out of the bill we're leading it to the wins of I'm not taking it out of the bill the section where it says this training has to be done in four hour because we don't know what bias incident is yet and put it in the working group to define what and come back with a recommendation for what would be that training requirement I think we can say that there's a requirement I want to go back to my early question I think it was Julio or TJ if somebody calls another person is that something that goes in what Senator White was talking about in terms of defining it and I think that has to be done I'm just saying that right now I think the bill is well structured in that it includes in addition to the training program my suggestion is that we put that out a year past the rest of the bill so that there's time not only for the working group to finish but to add it to the training and I think the other question that we could get testimony on further it should be more members of the working group yes for now I'm just adding the share of it so if you're doing a draft here you could put the Phillip recommendation for the White recommendation and then we can talk about it I'm still not convinced they're that different because the way this is worded it says you have to do bias incident training and it says how much it says a minimum of four hours of her training and what Rick talked about was not necessarily defining the number of hours but talking about outcomes that you're trying to achieve from the training and so they may come in we need this type of training around bias incidents because it's so complicated that we need this kind of training and so it should be done every other day or it should be 72 hours or it should be but by putting it in there with the other training or a crime we're already defining what the training is I'm just hoping that the draft will require training then we can talk about when it goes into effect but if what you're suggesting is that we instead have the working to investigate whether we need no no that isn't what I said okay that's what I heard you say that they are defining what bias incident means and then they're going to recommend the kind of training that has to happen around bias incident but it's a requirement yeah it's going to be required training but they have to define it first and then come in with recommendations that's all I would ask you to continue this conversation and I want to thank everybody for being here and helping me while it's an informal process