 You're on mute, Mr. Wiley. You're on mute. You start again. Thank you everybody for your indulgence. I'm sorry, I had to step out for a moment. I'd like to call our meeting to order. It is 535 PM on April 14th. We do have a quorum and I'd like to take our role at this time. Let me start with Ms. Pat. Yeah. Welcome. Thank you for being here, Ms. Forera. Here. Thank you as well, Mr. Vernon Jones. Here. Thank you, Mr. Vernon Jones for being here, Ms. Owen. Here. Thank you, Ms. Walker. Here. Welcome. Thank you, Mr. Cage. Here. Welcome. Thank you, Ms. Bowman. Here. Thank you, Ms. Bowman. And welcome. So here we are. And welcome to those in our community who are tuned into our meeting and logged in to be with us this evening. Welcome to you as well. Very quickly, we're going to go through. I believe what I'd like to do this evening is suspend the approval of the end review of the minutes of the 224 and 3, 3 agendas for this time and go right to those at the next meeting. But that is always our first order of business. But given what we have before us in the time frames we have, I'd like to defer those to our next meeting. We're going to, as we always do, go to public comment. And I will open the floor to members of our community safety working group for any lead commentary they have relative to our work from their individual experiences followed by our action and discussion items, which will consist of this evening of our consultant discussion, which will typically be an update from Seven Generations Movement Collective. The consultant group was working with us. And then we will return to a conversation about the community responders, which we must have as a group. And after that, we will look at upcoming events, set our next meeting date, and see if there are any topics that need to be discussed that were not presented in 48 hours to the chair before this meeting. And then we'll go to an adjournment. So again, thank you for all for being here this evening. And given that, I'd like to go straight to our reports and comments. And I'd like to open it up for public comment. And Ms. Moisten will recognize those in our community outside the primary group who would like to make a comment at this time. At this time, no one has their hands raised. Just wait a second more to see if there are any. OK, not seeing any at this time. I want to thank you all who are attendees to the meeting for being here. And we'd like to move forward. And I'd like to open it up to our community safety working group members for any updates, opening comments that they would like to make at this time before we get into our action and discussion items. So to the group, Ms. Ferreira. I just want to make a quick comment. You know, obviously another life has been lost out in the Nassota area by where the trial is happening. No, very frustrating. Just, you know, just so difficult. See it again. And of course, we're having conversations at home, you know, with my kids. And they're all, you know, startled, just afraid, as we all are, right? Parents, community members, and all of that. So reminding us again about how critical it is the work that we're doing and really making sure that it's, you know, work that's going to be revolutionary and long-standing and cause long-standing change, you know, in the community. Because it's my thing. And I think a lot of people are losing faith, you know, that something is going to change. I did look at one of the information that I think, I'm not sure who sent it, maybe community members, what have you around the East Hampton report, if I was interesting. And it is, you know, I didn't read the report because I get the 115 pages. But I did say about, you know, investing in non-police community led responses to safety and health concerns, you know, kind of going around, you know, the same thing that we're looking on. And obviously we're looking at things beyond the recommendations that we have on there. But everything else seemed kind of like, I mean, I'll say kind of run of the mill will be the word that I would say, but, you know, and it seemed like they did have some members on the team, on the group that ended up leaving because they weren't happy with how things were progressing. So, you know, so obviously I know that, you know, when you're doing this type of work, it's not easy. And we all need to be, you know, strong and kind of focused in terms of what needs to be done here. But I am going to, you know, I do want to kind of look further into their report and see what else they came up with. But I thought that that was interesting. Thank you, Ms. Ferrer. Other comments, Mr. Vernon Jones. I just wanted to echo what Deborah said about how deeply painful it is to have to face yet another police killing of a black man. And it does underline the importance of what we're doing. And I wanted to report that Ms. Pat and I did meet with the executive directors of the bid and the chamber and the chamber director brought along the guy who runs Global Cuts in South Amherst and Dr. D. Shabaz joined us as well from seven generation. And I think it was a very fruitful discussion and I would summarize it saying they would like to be supportive of our work. Ms. Pat is, I don't know what you would like to share with the group about it. So, first of all, I want to also echo what Ms. Ferrer said about the events of this week as a black parent. It has not been easy not to call my kids to tell them I love them or you never know to appreciate life every single day. It's just exhausting. I'm very tired this week. That's how I'm feeling. Trying to pick myself up, but it's been very difficult to have young lives, loves like that. So, in terms of the meeting we had yesterday, I thought it was very productive. From my perspective, it was a robust discussion. And for the chamber and their rep, for them to trust us to speak from truth was very helpful rather than being defensive. So, and also Kiam, the owner of Global Court to have a representative from Bicorps community was really nice too. And of course with Dr. D being there. So I thought we had, I'm very hopeful about the chamber and bed. There's a lot of work to do that I think we started the conversation yesterday. So we'll see how it goes. Basically what they're recommending is to have more police officers on the street. That's what they're pushing for. I don't want to go into details of what they're saying downtown Amherst in particular, but that's what they're recommending. But they're open to other alternative public safety and they were very much like too, they're hoping that would be an easy phone number beside 911 because people are used to calling 911. If we can come up with alternative phone number, people can call that's really easy to remember. It will be good. But overall, I liked it. Thank you, Mr. Vernon Jones, Ms. Ferrera, Ms. Pat, other members of our working group. I have a comment myself, but I'll defer to the last spot on the comment list unless someone else has something they want to say. Okay, I'm not seeing any hands on the screen and I thank you all for your comments. I not to repeat, but I do want to echo what was said by our first three members of our working group. And for me as someone who identifies as African-American who's been living in this community since 82 and have been through a number of different experiences over the years, both in Connecticut and here, to see the events unfold at this time over and over again is extremely difficult for me. And it takes a lot to bring energy to these kinds of meetings to do this kind of work. And so there's a lot more preparation besides just reading documents and spreadsheets and those kinds of things, but there's a preparation that has to be made spiritually and emotionally, which I'm doing and I'm here, but just want to acknowledge how viscerally painful this has been for me. And as I say that, I want us all to be able to take that in but also get to a place where we don't forget those kinds of things, but that we put ourselves in a place where we can begin to innovate and activate and be the messengers that we need to be at this particular time. I am 71 years old right now and I've seen this, thank you Ms. Pat. I don't know what that applause meant, but thank you anyway, but I have seen this over many years as a black person and a black male in particular in this country. And so I just want to say it takes a lot of energy for people like me to come to this kind of work, but it also drives this kind of work. And I hope we can, as I sometimes term it, I don't know how good it is, not sort of fall in love with the problem, but address the problem directly. And I think our issue today and every day as a committee is to put something on the table that says, we are the messengers, we know what the message is and we need to put it forward and do the best we can with that particular piece of it and keep moving forward. I would hope that we bring our emotions with us, but not let us, not let it invade our purpose and what we have to do. So I appreciate everyone's comments and I do see one more hand from Ms. Bowman. And I think after Ms. Bowman's comment, unless there's others, we will move forward to our agenda and welcome our consultant, Ms. Bowman. Right back, but don't wait for her. Hi. Oh, I have to take my hand out. I'll figure that out in a moment. So I missed some of that because I was getting Benji into the car. So I missed everybody's comments basically. But I did catch a little bit and I just wanted to say that I am actually not watching the trial and actually really trying to stay away from anything having to do with the trial in particular. And really staying, like I thought that after we elected a new president, I'd be okay with being on, you know, getting on and watching the news again. And I still can't do that. And it's a lot. It's really mentally taxing. And unfortunately, like I really, I'm really having, like I'm really having, like this is my hardest day out of the week because it's so emotionally taxing. And I, having lived in Amherst for 30 years, like I just, I hate to say it, but it's like I really have a hard time having confidence in this process. And I'm trying to really like be here and be open for it. But as a woman of color who has seven boys, six of which are children of color or not, they're not all children, some of them are adults, like I walk with a lot, with a heavy, a lot of fear. I walk with a lot of fear. I walk and at first I didn't walk with fear when they were home, but you know, then we had the incident with my oldest. So now I walk with fear when they're home. And so that's why I'm here and that's why I'm trying to stick this through because I really need to push for, I really wanna be here to push for change to happen. Even if I don't end up staying in the area for one reason or another, like I want this next generation that's coming up to not have to deal with a lot of the same things that I watched my kids have to go through or that I went through when I was a youth here and so I just wanted to put that out there that I've had a lot of emotion when it comes to this because I feel like one of the things that I feel like, and yes, I'm generalizing, but Amherst as a whole has done is really disappointed me when it comes to issues that directly affect the BIPOC community. I really feel like time has been wasted a lot and I know Ms. Pat had talked about that before about other committees that have been put together that we're supposed to be doing progress and that's what, and I think a lot of you have not have understood that about me, that I'm really fearful that this is gonna just be another one of those situations where there's, things don't go through and I feel like that actually is really like, especially when we're working on a committee like that and then things don't go through, I feel like that's really disrespectful to everybody in the committee when there's no actual intent behind making this, making the, you know, let actually having that committee, they're working, what I'm trying to say is working towards the goal of that, the committee or towards, or taking the committee's recommendations or whatever the case may be regarding that committee, like I just really feel like it's really disrespectful to like take up people's time and I know that's happened many, many times. So I think that's where a lot of my frustration comes on top of, you know, getting little whims of the next black person who's been killed, the next black person who's been killed, the next black person who's been killed by the hands of police. So that's just, I just wanted to like put that out there, like this is really, this is like, this is a lot, this is a lot and I'm trying to do self-care outside of this to deal with that. Because, you know, my emotions are everywhere because any one of those people who have lost their lives could have been my children, you know? So it's like, yeah, I'm frustrated. So anyways, but I'm here, I'm here and I'm trying to be positive. So that's all I have to say. I will be silent now for a little bit. Thank you, Ms. Bowman and, you know, I hope that, and you didn't hear the other comments, but I think it mirrored some of what you just said from Mr. Vernon Jones and Ms. Pat, Ms. Pereira and myself. I think it echoed a lot of what you just said. And I'm hoping we can reserve some energy as a group to take some of this pain and anguish and turn it into purpose. And that's what we need to do. And although that is very hard and difficult, many of us are used to hard and difficult. So I hope we're not dissuaded or discouraged by any of that kind of challenge being put before us and that we continue to move forward. I'll just say as chair, I appreciate everyone's efforts in at this moment. And before I just move on to welcome our consultant group, I do want to thank, as always, you know, Ms. Moisten for dealing with this group every week. We are putting a lot of effort forward. And so thank you, Ms. Moisten. I also want to reach out to Mr. Backelman, you know, this is not only like group he has to pay attention to it in the town. So I want to thank you, Mr. Backelman, too, for your communication with us. I want to thank you for sending the link to the video where you did your presentation. It was very helpful to me and probably to others. Thank you for the other information you sent to us regarding what you're thinking around some of the financial issues related to what our proposals might be done. So I know this takes extra work. And I want to thank you for it because it gives us the kind of information that we need to move forward. And we want to respect that and honor it. And I, you know, when we get into the discussion of the Crest proposal, I'm sure many of us will really want to interact with you around that. So I will go forward with that. So Ms. Moisten, and then we'll move to our agenda. So first I just want to say, you guys know I love working with this group and I hope that we do get to make some real changes that impact, but I also want to let you know that I know that we skipped over the public comment because at the moment no one had their hand raised. But Mr. Vincil Connor is here and has his hand raised. So I just wanted to alert you to that. Okay. That was my final comment. I'd be happy to return to Mr. O'Connor. If he would welcome this comment. I want to hear what he has to say as well as the committee as a working group. So if we could take a couple of minutes, Mr. O'Connor, you'd welcome him for a few minutes and then we need to move forward. There are people waiting to present. So is this appropriate time to make a comment? Yes. Okay. So yeah, I too was, I don't have television so I don't see any of this stuff, thank God. And as a person who took in a black male child that when he was between his junior and senior year in high school and who has left us after seven years, last August, I had lots of fears and there were nights when I just wished that he would come home. So I think I want to say that I think it is important for the committee to articulate that the policing function of in the United States is basically the genesis of that function was both racist, misogynist and homophobic without end, but to make an important distinction between the nature of the institution and the people who are participants in the institution, because I think there is a difference. But unless we can see the institution as a problem without attacking the individuals who are currently members of the institution, I think we're going to have trouble convincing the public that the institution is a problem. I do think that in addition to the larger concern of the committee, I hope the committee will do make some concrete suggestions for policing. Not, you know, I believe in abolishing the department and having it an armed force and an unarmed force serve under someone who's a member of neither. But I do think it is important to, for example, to make it clear to the police chief and to the town manager, the city manager that they have to have a plan because there is in the Minnesota suburb a city manager and a police chief who are out of their jobs because over the space of a single day, they mishandled the situation. And even though this is Amherst and people say it will never happen here, that is the very attitude that leads to this type of poor management of a situation that shouldn't have happened. And two people lost their jobs very quickly. And so that kind of a suggestion, they have to have a plan and they have to know what they would do if a situation even approaching this happened. And also secondly, I think that we need a rule saying nothing encourages the police to make disproportionate stops of black and Latino people more than the thought that if they stop X number of people, they will find somebody with an outstanding warrant. And quite frankly, I do not believe that as a result of a traffic stop, any outstanding warrant should be enforced upon a driver or anyone in the vehicle. The traffic stop should be a traffic stop for whatever and there should be no warrant enforcement because this is what encourages the police to abuse their authority to target people of color with traffic stops. And I think that whether we have to do it at the state level or we have to have it be a directive of the town government or of the city government, it this is the kind of thing that will discourage the misuse and abuse of traffic stops which have led to all these tragic and horrific situations. So, please, whatever the charge was which I have not seen in writing, don't stop at the words. This country is in a situation where every intelligent, organized thought about where to go needs to be put in writing at every level of government to really convince people that this institution of policing has to be radically transformed in the same way that Harry Truman radically transformed the US military by his executive order of the late 40s. It is that kind of a transformation that needs to happen and it unfortunately is only gonna happen at every level where there is a police department and we should make our contribution, however small it may seem to be. Thank you very much. Welcome, thank you. Thank you, Ms. Moyson for inviting Mr. O'Connor in and Mr. O'Connor and other members of the community, I would welcome you to stay, to listen to our conversations and be further informed by our work and wanna thank you for our contributions. I'd like to move very quickly to welcoming Dr. Shabazz and Terry Mullen into the group for their update. And as we welcome them, let's just make a welcoming comment. Thank you all for being here. Thank you both of you for being here and thank you for the work of the seven generations movement collective. This is a very important time for us and the information that you're gathering, I'm sure is gonna be very valuable to us as well as the things that you're learning that can be shared with us in the town of Amherst. So I wanna thank you for being here and spending time with us and weekly giving us an update. Just to let you know, we are gonna be having conversations about community responders and potentially conversations about oversight beyond the tenure of this community safety working group. So if you find it within your schedule and your timeframe to stay with us through those conversations, we'd welcome your presence so you can hear our deliberations as well. So let me just stop there and welcome you and thank you and I'll turn this over to Dr. Shabazz. Welcome Dr. Shabazz. Hello. Welcome Terry Mullen. Thank you all for just working, doing the work you're doing. I had the privilege of being able to sit in on the meeting with the chamber and the bid with Russ Fernan Jones and Ms. Pat and I found it really informative. I'm sure they'll share more with you but I'll save my comments for the report because I think what they shared in terms of maybe what business owners are experiencing around policing is really helpful but also how they utilize policing and that was illuminating because they are assessing it not only as business owners but as people who are in experienced life as white and privileged. And it's something that they shared with us in a very authentic way. And there was a business owner who experiences life as a black male who also shared how he experiences policing and as a business owner and also Ms. Pat's years of experience as a business owner in Amherst and now in Hadley. So I think there is lots to parse out in terms of that information and how it might be used to advise but certainly Dr. Russ Fernan Jones and Ms. Pat would be able to also share more about that. To that end, we have a draft for the Part B of the research we have been working on just a bit of preface to that. Terry Mullin is leading this portion of the project and Terry will present the draft. We have another researcher that we contracted with very bright young person who's also been working on this. So three of us have been working on this. There's still information that we are waiting on particularly some of the people that I'm interviewing in the town regarding services. So that has yet to be fully written up but it represents only a draft. So I think without further ado why don't I let Terry take it from here and then I'm sure we'll break for questions that you all might have. Thank you. So if it's all right with everyone, I'm just gonna go ahead and share my screen. Do you all see outline introduction, history and context? Is that enough primitive? Yes. Okay, thank you. Terry, would it be possible to make that just a bit? Ooh, a bit larger. That's great. I'm not that old, Terry. Fuck. That's good. Thank you. Appreciate you, man. Yeah, so, yeah, so this is just a draft of kind of what the goal is to cover. So specifically we're looking at a bunch of review boards these four are kind of some of the more interesting ones. Honolulu probably has one of the strongest physical power to do things they can, they have full subpoena power, they can fire and I believe they're even involved in hiring the chief of police. Cambridge is fairly old, currently defunct in some ways. But they are seeking applications. They should have received them at the end of March for their board and they've been in service since 1984 with a decent amount of power. Ithaca had very little power but is hoping to flip to a much stronger fully subpoena powered board and then Oakland similar to Honolulu has full subpoena power and can also remove a chief of police. We're gonna go through the knack hole types of review boards for you all. And I think with the review boards, the biggest questions that like basically need to be decided for Amherst is this idea of volunteer and not volunteer and will they be compensated positions? What type of training will be given to them? How will they be selected? And so the details this week that we hope to flush out are looking at the charter and looking at what type of legal things we have to our disposal and what things might need to change if a review board were to be put into place and how to make it effective because unfortunately even though like Honolulu and Oakland have and I believe Albuquerque is another good example have kind of like the stronger types of review boards with some paid positions and staff support. Unfortunately, they are still getting a lot of, they're not very well trusted, they're not very effective in yet in their task of, I mean really like you all were talking about at the beginning just that black men and women keep dying at the hands of police in ways that don't make sense to as a way to make things safer or that that's not an effective way to get this goal of public safety, which is what supposedly everyone's going for. So unfortunately these review boards don't seem to be doing discouraging police misconduct in a measurable way since but yeah, so kind of going into the theory of why that might not happen. And if there are things about Amherst, I mean, we're significantly smaller than those cities. I saw as a member of the group who went and listened to a lot of the police presentations this past summer, it seems we do have a police force who's interested in a civilian oversight board that's supposed to do a lot. A good working relationship can go a long way. So there might be some good things about that, but the main thing is kind of having, there's this idea in review boards that when they are only reactionary, like you get a complaint, you investigate the complaint and if they're under staffed and under resourced on top of that, there's not a ton that they can do. Whereas if they're more like the investigators or doing more systemic audits or this administrative prosecutal units, which is out of the city of New York as the only one who's doing it. And so that's probably unattainable with our budget, but only then can you see like what's happening systemically and what types of things that are going on that maybe things like, for example, oftentimes disciplines are wiped from police records. So if an officer commits a misconduct, that's deemed a misconduct, it will stay on their record for an X amount of time. And after that time, the slate's wiped clean. If an auditor saw that maybe those officers continue after the slate is wiped clean to struggle with misconduct, then that might be a place to review the contract or things like that. And then you can make more systemic changes, but that really requires resourcing and staff, which I think is definitely possible with some adjustments and then some taking away from some of the police budget or from other places to bump that up. And kind of as I go through this, we'll kind of talk about some of the reasons why that that might be effective in terms of the data that we've been seeing from the APD and from the call logs. And I'll reference some of that, but I don't know if you want me to stop after each service. Would it help for Terry to stop after each service? And then if you all have questions about that section because it is rather dense. I would suggest that because as I'm sure, like myself, I'm processing some of this information I'm hearing, I have several questions, certainly some comments on it. I don't want to occupy the time with that, but if we could stop Terry and take a moment to see if there are any reflections or questions from our working group that we might want to put forward, whether for an immediate answer or for further discussion, that would be helpful to us. And let me preface that by thanking you for your work on this as well. Absolutely, I'm very happy. I'd like to open it up to the working group, Ms. Owen. Terry, thank you so much for putting this together. Can you turn your volume up a little bit, unless it's me? Yeah, can you guys hear me better? A little bit. Okay, I'll just come close. The question that I'm interested to learn more about is what type of proactive approaches are boards taking and are these boards that are compensating people on their review board? Hey, if I could just stop there for a second, if Terry, you heard that question, right? Yeah, what type of approaches are proactive approaches are boards taking and are boards compensated and are those proactive board compensated for their efforts? Thank you, I wanna just scan our group to see if there are other questions we can put in right now that maybe you can collate these things in some way in an answer rather than one by one, that some of them might overlap. I don't know, depending on what people have, but I'd like to open up the question frame right now to our working group to see if in addition to Ms. Owen's question, there are other questions people wanna ask at this moment. Mr. Vernon Jones. I would just comment that looking at our charge, we actually have until the end of June to work out the details of our recommendation here, but the big priority is if we're gonna have something happen in this area in the next year, what needs to be budgeted for it? So I'm particularly interested in what kind of training would be needed for people to serve on such a board. I kind of wish we could get away from this term review board which sort of emphasizes the reactive, they think more of a civilian oversight board and whether the members of the board are paid or volunteered, that seems to me they need to have funds to hire investigators for some complaints and issues. Thank you, Mr. Vernon Jones. So if Terry, you can just put those two in the pocket for a moment, those two questions, Ms. Owens and Mr. Vernon Jones's question. I have one. I think I can't see on your screen right now, but you mentioned communities in Honolulu, Cambridge, Ithaca, Oakland, the only thing that sounds familiar to me is Cambridge. So I'm wondering how Amherst might mirror some of what that community might be doing. I think we're looking toward trying to see what is comparable, what is maybe parallel in addition to what is being effective. I don't know how long these Honolulu, Cambridge, Ithaca, Oakland, you know, these examples are in place and what the results are, but that would be important for us to know. And so let me leave it at that right now. So it's just something comparable to Amherst based on what little we know about now because we're still gathering information about Amherst through your work as to what we might be looking at. And if I may just take a moment, I think all of us on this committee, on this working group, are having a clearer and clearer and clearer as we go understanding of the history of policing in this country, that it is historically racist and oppressive. Okay, whether it's Honolulu, Amherst, New Haven, where I came from, you know, no matter where it is, the basis for this work has a racist and oppressive premise. So this is not, to me, doesn't go to people personally, certainly who are in the police force, but systemically it goes to them, if you see what I'm saying. So I'm trying to see, like, trying to, I think that's what we're trying to carry forward, like, how does this, how do we unravel this? And as I focus on Cambridge, I'm trying to look at something that's closer to Amherst. Any other questions that you want to post to Terri at this point, folks, Ms. Herrera? Before we move on, just clarify, Mr. Wiley, your questions, because you kind of had a big paragraph and I just want to make sure I got them all down. Sorry about that, Terri. I have big paragraphs. No, I just want to make sure I got the good just, so. My question is basically, my question is basically, are there, you know, I'm looking at Honolulu, Cambridge, Ithaca, and Oakland. The other stuff I put on as a backdrop to this, but the closest comparison I can think that Amherst might be Cambridge. And I'm wondering if, as we look forward to this, are we looking at review, can we look at review borders that parallel Amherst as a community? Thank you for asking me that. Yeah, thank you for clarifying. Yeah, and I think someone had to hand them over. Ms. Herrera, thank you. Well, for me, my question would, or I guess my ask would be to just kind of for you to continue down the line of the efficacy of these review boards because I really, you know, in terms of us making recommendations. So I do want you to kind of focus on the ones that you said that have had some type of success because for me, I'll be interested in that because obviously if these review boards are ineffective to curtail police misconduct, then I wouldn't want to put my recommendation towards that. You know, I wouldn't want to put the limited budget in resources that our town has towards a review board. I'd like to focus on something else. So I do, I'm very interested in focusing on that information, the efficacy of these review boards. I would like to recognize Mr. Vernon Jones's comment. And then if I could take a pause there to allow Terry Mullin to just kind of recalibrate and respond to the several questions that they've received. Mr. Vernon Jones. I think one of the things that has made this community safety working group, a strong group is that it by design has a majority of BIPOC membership. And so in reviewing the efficacy of these groups, I'd like to know, are we looking at any that had majority BIPOC membership? And in making recommendations, I hope you will recommend that a majority of any such oversight commission in Amherst would be BIPOC because I am interested of course in changing police conduct, but I think we're also engaged in a bigger project of trying to transform for more power within the town to the BIPOC community. And it seems this to give a majority BIPOC board real power and some control over the police department is a systemic change that changes the power relationship of communities in the town and could be very important from that regard. Thank you, Mr. Vernon Jones. And okay, Ms. Pat, and then I'm going to go back to the top. You're on mute. Okay, I'm going to make my very short. Terry, thank you very much for putting this together. In your research, did you find any of the boards that didn't have a police union in their community? I'm just curious to know about that. Okay, thank you, Ms. Pat. And let me just cut off our questions right now because I was responding to Dr. Shabazz's suggestion that we stop at a certain point and come back to allow you, Terry, to comment as you're able and willing to at this point to the various questions we've asked you. So, I don't have to repeat those questions because I don't think we were able to do that, but anyway. I got them all down. So, please, you respond to that segment and then we can move forward. Thank you. Awesome, yeah. So, most of them I will take with me. So, what type of proactive approaches for Ms. Owens and are those proactive boards compensated? Based on the research, the more quote unquote like effective or I wanna be really exact. I'll have to firm up the details, but it's my understanding from what I've researched so far that the most effective boards are the ones who are compensated. The proactive approach is I'll have to come back to you on that. Mr. Vernon Jones, as far as training and budget, I'll have to come back on specifics, but there is a wide variety of training available and under the NA, COLE, NACL, Oversight kind of commission that's national. And then they also said there's also some investigators that are kind of built into the system in general in other agencies that might be able to help with this on like smaller levels. Mr. Wiley, to Mira Amherst, I actually think Ithaca is the closest in terms of demographics and understand kind of, I mean, they operate on a county system so they're slightly different in terms and they have a mayor. But other than that, they're college town, they have very similar racial demographics. They kind of end up in this semi-rural, semi-college town demographic. Cambridge is close in terms of under Massachusetts law, but it's just the amount of people is really quite different as I was reading about Cambridge and that they're a volunteer only review board, no compensation. I can't imagine finding, I am having trouble personally and I will also like go back to the research and what I've been reading that I would be nervous to recommend that just because of efficacy reasons and just we don't have the population to find the volunteers. And then, Ms. Rara, I completely agree the efficacy line is going to be the biggest part of this and I'll come back with more examples of kind of what pitfalls these boards have run into. Mr. Renjunz, I do think majority BIPOC memberships, that's a good question, I will look into that. And Ms. Onobaku, yes. The union, the police union is my understanding that most police departments have some sort of union participation, but I will check to see if any boards didn't. Okay, I think that was everybody's. Thank you very much. I'm sorry, go ahead, Mr. Clinton. Yeah, so I don't know, do you want me to keep going? I focus mostly since you were talking about the responder models on like the cahoots. So that's where most of my kind of statistics and research went into this week to get a more fleshed out kind of responder model. And I also don't want to take too much of y'all's time. We do have two other sections after this. So I don't know how you want to do it. Well, we can come back to that. I just want to first thank you for that first round of question answering. I realize these are in the moment and certainly stuff that you're close to or heavily involved in. So we all appreciate the place you're at in terms of answering these and I appreciate your responses. Given the fact that you're here, and we want you to be a part of this meeting as much as possible. Perhaps we can go on to the next piece of your report and then we can circle back if we need to, I think. Awesome. Thank you. Cool. So I focused a lot on the alternate responder model. So these are models like cahoots where there's a van that can reroute a 911 call or they can send, in Eugene they send a social worker and an EMT mostly to people and they can kind of keep them out of oftentimes the biggest kind of pro is that often these interactions, these calls don't wind up going any further in the criminal justice system. So oftentimes the threats aren't made, the situation is handled, people are given some services if those services are available and kind of really just doing a, there's a different type of responding. But so cahoots is kind of the first big one that everyone kind of goes to. They were founded in 1989, which I'm sure you all have been researching this for a while as well. So I won't go too much involved in it, but they really ramped up throughout the years. They started very small, just one van and then in 2015 was the last time I saw an expansion and that's when after a case of, two cases of police brutality or two cases of questions of police brutality, I guess, technically were brought up because they weren't operating 24 or seven. They were closed from like 3 a.m. I think till eight in the morning. And a few things happened during those hours. So they expanded to the 24 seven option in 20, after 2015, so in 2016. And then there's Denver with the STAR program and they started in June 2020 with their pilot program from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. They focused on what they said was high risk neighborhoods. That's kind of a point of contention. They were given 3 million to expand the service to 24 seven just recently. And it's in the first six months, they responded to 748 incidents and then required police or led to arrest or jail time, which is pretty impressive, in my opinion. And then what's also really good, what I really like from STAR is that they have plans to track further than just the initial police interaction because as we know, this is the whole system, the whole criminal justice system is really being called into question as it should be because we see the jail times and the court cases and the bail sets also are riddled with racism and oppressive natures. So they're also going to be tracking that down, which is a very big task that I have tried before in the past to do for our area. And it's very near difficult, but near impossible to track down what happens after the police interaction, after the arrest. So basically, and I think this is what kind of we've been, or you all have been saying, and I may have been dancing around a bit, is the question that has not been answered by either Cahoots nor the STAR program is do alternate responder models actually solve the problems that they set out to solve? Do they decrease fatal police interactions? Do they give hope folks with mental health issues better care, work better for houses, individuals, help the city understand the population, facing substance abuse or addiction issues? And are they able to actually uphold anti-racist ideals? And I mean, that's a really long, big question and to my knowledge, there's not an amazing way to kind of assess that. So what I did this week is in both cities, Eugene and Denver, I went through all of the media reported officer shootings, officer involved gun violence, specifically just to see kind of what the effect was on that, if there was any pattern, if even just like anecdotally by what the media's reporting, what's going on? Because this is kind of one of the first places that people kind of can grasp how the criminal justice system and the police are becoming so are, have always been oppressive and violent in ways that aren't what we might want as a community. So in Denver, from June 20th to December 2020, and I will say this is officer-involved shooting. So I'm, this is, I will be talking about stories that are kind of heavy. So if you need to tune out, I don't think you'll miss too much, but the short of it is they're still officer-involved shootings, some of them appear justified. The biggest thing that I noticed is that it's just not a, it's not as clear cut as we see people portray it. Some people are, some suspects are very violent towards the police and they survive and some suspects aren't violent towards the police and they do not survive. And that is concerning, obviously. So in Denver, seven incidents where police shot at a suspect occurred, five of them resulted in a civilian dying. Five of the incidents involved civilians carrying guns, not all of the suspect carrying guns were the ones who ended up being killed, so that those two aren't the same group. One of the people killed was just carrying a knife and one of them was unresponsive in their car and somehow it ended up turning into a shooting situation in a, which was very confusing. There wasn't actually a lot of reporting on that one, but in, so basically from that limited kind of efficacy question like are fatal police interactions going down? It's kind of unclear. I went back to 2019 and there were 10 officer-involved shootings, seven of those shootings ended with the suspect getting killed by the officer and one suspect died by suicide. So that was a year without stars. To go back further, we'd have to do a lot more analysis to see if that interaction really had a change or if those six months were rare. But it's just interesting to kind of talk about this idea of like a pilot program and things like that being one of the big ways we view policing and these types of things is through these fatal police interactions. And so I think it's always important to center that that type of interaction, while police are still carrying guns and while just because you add a community service, a community or a alternate responder model doesn't necessarily take change to the police and so like that's kind of a little bit what I'm getting at here. And even in Eugene, which has had this program for 30 years, they still have these issues with officer-involved shootings. And one of the big cases that of police brutality that resulted in them going 24-7 was a black family that was affected by it. And again, like a misunderstanding with a, I couldn't find the age but every article referred to this person as a son with a brain injury and like a misunderstanding as far as what he needed to be calmed down, a de-escalation type thing. So again, these community responder models don't necessarily have a complete overhaul where you never have officer-involved violent situations. And then the other thing I will say, and I know you all are very sensitive to this because I've heard you say you don't want to do a pilot program. As Star was a pilot program, they were only eligible, they only really had access to a few neighborhoods and they were estimating that only 2% of the calls that are currently fulfilled by police are even eligible for to be rooted to Star because of the smallness of the pilot. So that was kind of like another interesting point to bring up that the pilot can be good. And it seems like Star did a lot of really great work with what they were able to do, but I think what I've heard you all say is that that might not, we should try to keep it as effective as possible and we're seeing that these 24-7 models are really what is needed. And then, so another way to view the efficacy is rather kind of who the programs are helping. So to start. If I apologize for interrupting, but this is very valuable information is very detailed and it's somewhat very symptomatic of a big problem that we're looking at. And this is not to say this is not helpful and informative. And I think as I'm looking at this and I don't have access to the full scroll going down, but there's a lot of detail starting from Kahoot's going down to Denver to Eugene, et cetera. And there's a lot of highlighting of incidental and symptomatic behavior that's coming out of this stuff. I'm wondering if there's any way to collate this at this point with full respect in regard for what you wanna report to us as to say, where are we in terms of looking at what might be the touchstones for efficacy and what we might be considering in Amherst? And that's a tougher question, but I think a lot of these things that we're reading are certainly a number of things that we've read as well. Absolutely. So we join you in the data collection and the understanding of it. At the same time, if we're looking to move this to a place of where do we go next? Right. What have you garnered from this efficacy study to this to date? You know, there's more certainly to be done that would be informative to our process as we look at community responder models, as we look at oversight committees or boards. I hope we wanna term that at some point. If you get what I'm saying, is that a fair request? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And the other thing, if I may, just the other thing is like, this is a very detailed report and it looks like you spent a lot of time on this. It was more than five minutes, right? Yeah. Yeah, okay. So if it was more than five minutes, I'm wondering also in the future, if this is something through your work as a group of consultants, if this is something that we're going to be using as a discussion, as part of maybe a discussion, is there some way we can get this in advance so that we can absorb some of this information because I think this is extremely rich stuff that you're bringing. And it may be a catalyst to some thinking on our end as well. So I don't know how easily it is to release that information to Ms. Moisten and to the community service working group. I already sent it to you. Yeah. So in advance, it gives us a little pre-read. Yeah, yeah, I'm sorry about that. I apologize for, you know. No, no, no, this is good feedback. I know you're coming here to report and we all appreciate it, but I'm trying to get to the essence of where this report is going. Yeah, so I think in the essence is like, basically Kahootz and Starr kind of provide a really good pre-pilot for us to kind of learn from. And basically it seems the 24-7 is very important. It also seems that it doesn't automatically kind of change the police system. So it can't, when we're talking about reform and we're talking about these acts of violence that can happen, it can't be on its own. So these things are really good and they're really, really helpful. And what's great about Amherst for this type of work is that it can actually flip over to a data collection that came from, sorry, Crabtree, is that, and let me resume there. I don't know why this is paused. If I stop sharing and go to here, you can see that from the call logs, Zoe went through and marked each call, gave it a bin kind of from these reasons, follow-up, suspicious, community policing, noise complaint, well-being check. And you can see that by at least one person's careful analysis, possibly up to 36% of our calls could be diverted out, wouldn't need an armed person. So we could really do something big in Amherst by moving some of the calls that we're seeing and some of the things that we're seeing to someone who is unarmed who can do a well-being check in a really kind and compassionate way. And then there's this other idea of right now, we do have a model of community policing or where the police are initiating a lot of calls. So that's another place where it's not one of our services necessarily, but that's kind of a partner to the community responder, the responder model, because if the police are initiating the call, then they can't diverge the call to the community responder, the alternate responder person because they were the one who decided, they viewed something as suspicious or needing a police interference. So that's like these communities respond the, sorry, I keep saying community, the alternate responder models need to work with, need to assess also what the boundaries are and make it really clear that like, if someone's being disruptive, but they're not being violent, then it's the press person who goes in. So that will be something that's very necessary and that everyone needs to be aware of that the APD currently, that's their, I don't wanna say pedagogy because that's like more like teaching, but that's their philosophy is to be very proactive and that might not work. That might be something we need to ask them to change if a community responder model would be better. Let me take a pause if I may, Terry, thank you so much. This is very detailed and very important information. There may be some comments, questions coming from our group. I'd like to entertain right now if you don't mind. Yeah, absolutely. Mr. Vernon Jones. Well, I like very much what we're getting from Terry. There's a lot here. I'd love to have a chance to read it. I'm also noting that an hour and 20 minutes of our two hour meeting has passed. If we have other agenda items, I think we need to think about how we wanna allocate the rest of our time. Thank you, Mr. Vernon Jones. Yeah, and I agree. And I think that was a little bit earlier about moving this forward a little bit in terms of getting to the efficacy point which, Terry, you responded to. One of the things that I think works for us, and this is a recent conversation clearly, but if we can have this information ahead of time before a meeting, then it really helps us to digest it a little bit. So the conversations are more focused, but certainly this is the work you're doing and that's what we've asked you to do and this is happening. So we certainly appreciate it. And thank you, Mr. Vernon Jones, because I was trying to, I don't know how much more you have, Terry. I can stop here and I'll send you the rest of the record. That would be good. And because we do, and this actually folds into some of the conversation we need to have about Cress. So unless there are any other comments or questions from our group, perhaps we could take a moment here. We welcome you and Dr. Shiva certainly to stay online with us. If you're able to, to hear our discussions and just like to thank you for that information. Mr. Wall, I just had a quick comment. Sure, Ms. Prashman. No, I would just like to thank Terry again. Obviously this information is very valuable and it kind of just affirmed that you're on the right track. I did see like some questions when you were staying, obviously around Amherst that like the police haven't kind of drowned their gun or something like that over a decade or whatever. But I think the thing is is that, and I think you're on the right track, which is what we're concerned about is the interactions with our population and our community. And the fact that these interactions have had a myriad of different kind of violent acts, it doesn't have to be just obviously got a bit fatal, but obviously all of it is very traumatic, all of it is very violent. And so a lot of what you're talking about and these percentages, that's the type of information that I'm really interested in like to hear more. Thank you. So to Terry's credit, and this is just something having to do with our group, we're doing this work and life keeps going. We had two different illnesses in our group, my mother and someone else's mother that we had to attend to and Terry did a great job of compiling all the information. We will try to get it to you before the meeting, it was sent today, but I'm sure no one had time to digest it or go over it in time for the meeting. But we do encourage you to do so. Terry hyperlinked much of the information so you can see some of the references to the Denver program, to all these different programs that Terry has included for yourself. I think that would be extremely helpful to make some of those comparisons that some of you brought up. And Terry, did we share these charts with the CSWG? I can get permission to share them. I think some might have them already. Okay, all right. So maybe some of the ones that are pertinent to the research that you've compiled would be helpful to make some of those comparisons. I just want to say real quick, regarding some of the work that we're doing, we're looking of course nationally, we're making comparisons, and then we're looking locally. And some of the interviews that I'm doing and have scheduled to do email for them to answer questions or some of the services that are available here in this town already. And so, for instance, the family outreach of Amherst had a conversations with the folks on the crisis hotline and they walked me through a scenario of what happens when they get calls having to do with the mental health crises or suspected addiction crises. And that was very informative because that is a group that is already situated here. And if we think more creatively about ways in which to expand some of these services, perhaps, you already have folks who have expertise in the community regarding these issues. And maybe in consultation with them, we can figure out as a community how to link into those services and expand them because they shared that there are times in which, yes, they are called in to assist the police, but vice versa, there are times in which they assist when it's a non-life-threatening situation. It's a, you know, and Terry again shared with you the chart of most of those calls are non-life-threatening, not posing any threat or violence and the family outreach or other mental health professionals are called in to assist at that point. And they try not to, their policy is trying not to involve the police. So that was actually reassuring to hear what happens anecdotally, and I've asked them for the figures on these calls, but it's in line with what we heard from the chamber and the bid, is that people are taught to call 911. And if you're taught to call 911, if it's someone you see as a perceived as a vagrant and they're in front, you know, shouting obscenities in front of your storefront or whatever, and you want them to move and go away, you call the police. Likewise, you know, it's a real threat, you also call the police, but one is a much lower threat and may not pose any harm at all. It's just a bother. You see it as a bother and a nuisance and you still call the police. So these are things in which, you know, we could begin to rethink. I think people are indoctrinated to call 911 and maybe that is some switchboard type of training that if folks call 911, there should be an assessment of is this a mental health crisis? Is it a danger? And go through a matter of, you know, questions as to then how to direct the call to which service in the town would be most appropriate. So those are things to really think about. Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Shabazz. And thank you, Terry Mullin, for your presence and presentations here. We are actually, that's actually a segue into some of the discussion we have to have because we are looking at those very questions as well as others. And we, let me see some information from the town manager that informs that discussion as well. So we're gonna move to that at this point. We welcome your presence to stay on and listen and be informed because what we have to say through this discussion to the end of our meeting and possibly beyond might be informative to you as well as we feel strongly about some of these things that we may be coming to recommendation on. So thank you both for being here. Welcome to stay on. And I wanna move to our discussion about our Crest discussion, if we may. And I don't know if you're able to, Ms. Moisten to put up that last document we had sent by Ms. Ferreira and me to the group. To the group. Yes, just one moment. Sure, thank you. Is this the correct document? Yes. I believe that's it. And let me just make a brief statement about this opening it up. On a couple of occasions, we've tried to engage in conversation about this with the goal of coming up with a document that we could present to the town manager as our statement of need in terms of our work as in building a better safety program for our town. And this was our way of having this conversation. Since that time, we've not been able to fully engage that process. We spent a lot of time on questions one through three. We didn't get very far. Since that time, we've heard presentations certainly from Mr. Backelman at town meeting. We've received other information from Mr. Backelman regarding some specific numbers. And I think what I'd like to encourage our group to do is to have this discussion, but with an eye toward not getting bogged down in the details of any of the information regarding numbers and money, but to really focus on the nature and substance of what we're talking about we might need as a community in Amherst in terms of Cress. Because it's not just Cress, but it's also some other programs that support it on a town-wide basis. So Ms. Ferreira and I were proposing this format for discussion. We spent a lot of time on questions one through three. And just to refresh your memory if you haven't, if you don't remember it, try to just pull all the numbers together in a weighted fashion to see where we had lots of agreement. It certainly wouldn't mean we can't discuss any further, but the ultimate goal is we've got to get to a point where we can present something to our town manager as he has a budget deadline coming very rapidly. And we have to get this information to him so he can effectively present something and certainly understand where we're coming from. So let me just stop there and see Ms. Ferreira, any comments you wanna have as you were part of helping put this together, certainly? No, just in terms of us, yeah, like kind of focusing at the beginning of the discussion. I mean, obviously, you know, like Mr. Roosevelt and Jones I said it last time, one through three, we had a lot of discussion beforehand, not to say that we agree with one through three, obviously not, it's just that we've had discussions on it. It's just that, you know, and Mr. Bachman has come up with a budget in regards to how to address some of the issues that we had with one through three. So I think we could kind of start with that and then kind of move from there and focus on what we need to focus on. And there's some other ones that we saw some agreement on. We could still talk. We could probably move quickly through some of those. So thank you. And before we start, Mr. Bachman, I appreciate your presence here. I don't know if there's any, anything you want to contribute to this that before we have this discussion or there might be informative or you wanna just follow along with us? No, I think this has been, I mean, I think the consultants have set the stage for this conversation. So I appreciate the work that they've laid out and the work that you've done to prepare for the conversation. So I'll just listen at this point. Thank you. Ms. Moising, you make that a little bit larger. Thank you. So this first question we talked about at length that are a couple of meetings ago and this is about as far as we got with no resolution to it. I wanna say as we're going forward, certainly our ultimate goal is to be able to come up with something that we can be put in writing and send a message for us. Let me stop there. Mr. Vernon Jones. Well, I think questions one through three have been replaced by the motion that we passed at the last meeting asking the town manager to investigate a 24 seven program and how to fund it. I think we are no, my sense is we are no longer interested in what it says in one through three. We've said we want a 24 seven program and I would propose we go on to question four or some other question that you think is useful. That's my understanding as well. And I wanted to just make sure I just canvassed the entire group to see if there are any other comments about that. I don't think there's any reason to go back to that. And I think it would save us a lot of time. Ms. Walker. I just wanted to agree with Mr. Vernon Jones and then also thank Mr. Backelman for the document that he sent us detailing exactly what or an estimate of what the cost might be for such a program. So I think that's also helpful to refer to later when we go back to revisit questions one through three. Yeah. Ms. Ferreira, yes. Yeah. And just to kind of, you know, I think the only thing that we could do just to kind of make sure we're all on the same page, right? Is that one, that, you know, whatever salary is on hold, you know, whatever police positions we're not going to be agreeing to any of those in terms of, you know, funding those. And then, you know, whatever the budget is in terms of transferring those additional positions, you know, whatever the, wherever the money is going to be in terms of whether it's to the police or whatever else, it's going to be funneled to crest in the budget that they need, you know, to be 24 seven. And then definitely no increases in terms of the APD budget. Thank you, Ms. Ferreira. And then what I'd like to is just to say if Mr. Bachman had anything else to add in terms of what he, the budget that he spent, you know, if he had any, anything to clarify on there of that kind of speaks for itself. All right, let me, let me go to Mr. Bachman in a minute, Ms. Walker had her hand up. No, I think that the budget, I mean, there's the assumption that we put- I'm sorry, was that a previous hand that didn't get erased, Ms. Walker? No, sorry. You're good? Yes, thank you. Ms. Bachman, I'm sorry. Thank you, sorry about that. No, the budget has some assumptions in there. I tried to be explicit about the assumptions that, you know, like there's no, we don't expect it to pay rent or all those things, but we tried to incorporate as much as we could in the budget. I do note that the positions are all as budgeted or at the first step. So I don't really know what a social worker gets paid. We'd haven't done that kind of research to see if that's a competitive wage or not to attract people to take these positions. So we have a social worker on our wage scale. And so this is put placed at that wage scale on the first step. Have the members of our group been able to see the communication from Mr. Bachman relative to what he's referring to at this particular time? Yes. Oh, yeah, just people raising, okay. If you haven't, you know, that's fine. I think it's an important document to look at as we go forward, because it's certainly gonna inform what we have in terms of our next steps. Ms. Mohsen, could you scroll down to see the full piece of question four? Well, yeah. This one had a little more variability to it. And I'd like to hear the comments from the group at this point. Any comments you wanna make on this? Ms. Pat, and then Ms. Owen, and then Ms. Ferreira. I can't speak for everyone, but I'm not going to support any of this. Number four. But I'll respect whatever the group is saying. If I may ask, where are your reservations? If that's something you feel like sharing? Say that again? Would you feel like sharing your reservations on it? Absolutely. I do not think providing additional training to the police will make any reform or make any changes. So I don't want to dwell into that. That it's already budget for police ongoing in-service training or whatever. So I don't want to waste my time discussing question number four. Respect to do other people, I mean, in the way team. So whatever the team decides, I'll live with it. Understood, thank you. I just wanted to be sure that you had an opportunity to expand upon that. Not that you need an invitation to expand, Ms. Pat. I know you will if you want to. But that's my job here. So let's see, Ms. Owen, you had your hand up? Yeah, I'm kind of on the fence with the police training or the in-services and training for them just because I'm not sure they could be effective. So I wouldn't want to waste resources there. I am on board to hear what people think and to hear people who do think we should invest money here because I think that if as a group, we do decide to provide eight additional hours of training for every APD member that it has to be really intentional and not broad. Thank you, Ms. Ferreira. Yeah, for me, yeah, I don't agree with any allocation of funds for them in 4A, 4A or B. I really think that there needs to be an assessment done in terms of whatever is left over for them to do, which might only be, for me, it would only be for them to, if there's an actual violent type of incident that needs to be dealt with, then they would be the ones with a very small staff to be dealing with. So therefore, because I don't think training is effective for them in terms of like a bigger department, it would be limited training to a smaller staff because I don't think they should be dealing with noise complaint, disturbances, even traffic stops. I don't think they should be dealing with traffic stop. So it needs to be another group. Anyway, that's my thought. So yeah, so once they have a smaller group and there's an assessment, then we can see what they might need in terms of training and software and all of that. Thank you. I think Ms. Pat, you had your hand up again, then Mr. Vernon Jones. Well, there are a couple of electronic hands up too. Yeah, I'm trying to get them all. It's kind of hard. There's more different times on my screen, sorry. Ms. Walker has had names up. Yeah, let me go to the hands up. Sorry, Ms. Pat, if that's okay with you. Sure. I don't know, Ms. Bowman, Ms. Bowman and Ms. Walker, they came up. Hi, so I, excuse me, I absolutely do not agree on training officers. They have been shown time and time again to be set in their ways. And I don't think there's enough training to untrain what they've learned as far as the systematic racist organization that they work for. Also, I wanted to say to Mr. Bowman, I just did a quick search online and it looks like social workers in, for example, the Springfield area, the average base salary is 58 K a year. And that is someone who has worked one to three years. I don't believe we should be taking anybody who's worked under one year. They need to come in with experience. But we should absolutely be looking at someone whose experience and we need to be not looking towards officers as that in that role. I think that we're setting ourselves up for a lot of failure to even, entertain that as an option. Thank you, Ms. Bowman, on that piece on the social workers. I'm just taking some notes here myself, Ms. Walker. And then I'm going to Ms. Pat. Thank you. So I just also agree with what Ms. Bowman just stated that when we're looking to hire employees for the program that we should absolutely look for people that have training. And I don't think that we would necessarily want to hire entry level people for these positions. But then I just wanted to go back to what Ms. Pat was saying and also agree that I think we can completely jump over the section right now. I don't think we should invest any funds in police training. It has been shown time and time again that it does not have any effect. We saw in the most recent incident of police killing that a highly trained officer that was actually in charge of training other officers was the one who made the mistake, quote unquote. And so I just want to point that out that we don't really need to discuss this anymore and I think we can move on to the next section. Thank you. I did have a comment. Let me go to you, Mr. Bernard Jones first and Ms. Pat then I'll go. Well, I think that, I mean, you heard Terry Mullins say that having a Crest program doesn't change the police and you still have a police department. My recommendation would be that, I mean, I think we're gonna have a police oversight board that's gonna implement new policies and try to shift the mission of the police department. And I would not put more money in the police training budget for training. I would put some money in the oversight board's budget that they could use to train police officers or in how to implement new policies that that board came up with. But, you know, I will respect the will of the majority that we don't need to fight over that. But I would like to ask the town manager if you would find out whether or not something is needed to get timely transparent data posted by the police department. There was some discussion about, they didn't have the computer program or whatever needed to do it. I don't know if that's true or not, but I think we want the police to be posting data by race about stops and arrests on a regular basis so that the entire community can oversee the police department as well as the oversight board. Okay, I'll swing back to you, Mr. Bachman, if you wanna comment on that if I wanna go to Ms. Pat next, please. Ms. Pat. Okay, so I just want to remind us all that the APD was tasked several years ago to do data collection on traffic stops. And it was done by the town meeting body at that time and the select board actually supported that. And it was an African-American woman, Ms. Jackie Hazard who made sure that the town meeting passed it. So it's all about the will. I don't think APD wants to be transparent in terms of data collection. So using the skills of software is just to avoid the issue. If they want to do it, they will do it. So I don't think we should waste our time discussing whether or not we should have APD have software. It's just a waste of time. They don't want to do it. Thank you, Ms. Pat. I think the comment I want to make is related to what you just said, Ms. Pat. And I think that there have been a number of groups who have asked for information, especially with regard to race, ethnicity, and class. And this has not easily gotten from anybody, apparently, and it keeps occurring as an issue. So my only thing, while I come in line with what you're saying, certainly if an organization wants to do that they would, my question about this is that does the town, not necessarily the police department, does the town in capacity in collaboration with the police or any other organization have the ability to set up systems where we can collect data, that are responding to the questions coming from our community? If us and other organizations are coming to the police department and say, we want to get this particular information about race and it's not there, then could we create the structure and capacity to do it and compel the police in or the town to do it once the tool is there? So I'm just raising that. I would not want us to miss an opportunity to create a technological structure which allows us to collect as much information as we need in whatever form we need it and also be able to analyze it in a way that is useful to our community, especially if we're going to have an oversight board or something of that nature in the future. So I agree with you, Ms. Pat. I think it's a motivational thing. If you want to do it, you would have done it. I got that at the same time, is this an opportunity to create the structure by which to drive that motivation into that structure and make it happen. So I want to just raise that and then go back to Mr. Bachman. I think it was a question before me, before me and Ms. Pat to you and then I'll go to Ms. Bowman. So I think if the question is, can we collect that information? I will find out for you and it seems pretty straightforward. And if there's a technological challenge, those are things that can be overcome usually without much effort, but I will look into that. And I think Mr. Vernon Jones, you had a question for Mr. Bachman before that, did I miss that? No, it was only to find out whether there is a need, some sort of technological need in order to do this. I think we're going to recommend this. And I just want to make sure that if there is some budget need, we know what it is and it's taken care of. Thank you. Ms. Bowman, and then Ms. Bowman. I think that the what, so I'm going to reiterate that I absolutely don't think that anything should come out of the budget to, first of all, train police. And that should not be our responsibility. Our responsibility is to pass down recommendations, but I am absolutely heartbroken on the fact that we should absolutely not give any sort of leeway to the Amherst Police Department. And I'm really, this whole structure of the police is literally institutional racism. It's systemic racism. I just, oh my gosh, like we're giving too many passes to an organization that was literally built on the backs of collecting slaves to return to slave owners. And I don't care what it looks like right now. Look at other countries. There are many other countries that don't even use guns. They have tasers. That's what they use in order to subdue somebody, not kill somebody. Police in America are trained to kill if they think that one, they might get killed. And two, that if they think that there might be litigation against them because they didn't kill their suspects, that is another reason. They are shooting to kill. Our black sons and our black women and other people of color are dying. And do we need to really wait until this happens directly in our town before we make changes? Like, come on, people. Like we really need to look at this as if we were in Minnesota. That's how we need to be looking at this. We need to go to the extra extreme to prevent things from happening. I don't want to wait until my son dies in order to find, for this town to be like, oh my God. One of our community members died and we had this opportunity to make actual change. I don't care about people's feelings. People don't care about black people's feelings. And I'm so upset and I'm so tired of black people caring about white people's feelings when white people don't care about us. And yes, I'm making a general statement. And if it doesn't apply to you as a white person, then you shouldn't feel anyway. But if you feel some way about this, then maybe you need to look at how you're looking at the world. I'm not gonna be apologetic about this. I am concerned about the safety of my sons. I'm concerned about the safety of their friends. I'm concerned about the safety of people in this community. I have mental health issues that already have issues with the police that have to have and be face to face with police officers. No, they cannot be trained. Absolutely not. They are already set in a certain mindset. They cannot be trained. If that's where we're going with this and we're like, oh, we're gonna dump a bunch of money into training police officers, then again, I'm questioning why am I here? Because that's not reform. That is not defunding police. That is supporting a structural institution that has been made to break low income, BIPOC people, and I'm not for that. Thank you, Ms. Bowman. And I think that your comments resonate with a lot of folks. And part of our thing here is to take in those comments is very clear. We have some very clear and strong comments about training and other things. And the history of this is very apparent to a lot of folks. I don't want us to lose sight of what we have to do in terms of presenting this message, which incorporates your sentiments and other people's sentiments. And it's incumbent upon us to send this message and to get through this. This training piece is very clearly a matter for us. And I don't think anyone's endorsing training right now. We're certainly probably in the opposite direction. But I do want us to state our comments. I do want us to state ourselves clearly. And I do want us to get through this so that we can begin to articulate to this entire community what it is we want. Ms. Ferreira, I'll take a comment from you right now. And then I'm going to move on to question five. Well, I mean, I think that's what I want to do is kind of move us to the next question, which is to say, right? And we already had seven, if we totaled it, like leaning to this degree and no leaning, seven, leaning to degree five, right? So we already know, and basically by us having discussion, it just really cemented that, that we have a seven to five basically saying no to those two questions. And then for us to move on, right? To number five. Can you scroll down a little bit, Ms. Moisten, to this question so we can see the rest of the question. No, no, no, I'm just saying the on question four. Originally we had leaning to this degree, four of us, leaning to this degree. Then three of us that said no leaning. And then all we wanted to do was obviously have discussion around it, but I think we're still there, right? Where it's seven no's and five yeses. So basically saying that we're at a no with A and B. You see what I'm saying? I do see exactly what you're saying. And I appreciate it. I should have responded more coherently to that than I did. But I get what you're saying. And I think it's clear what the message from our group right now is related to that. And thank you. Yeah, so that we can move on from that. And then, yeah, and then so that we can continue to move. But one thing that I want us to stick a pin on is we still have to have hopefully at the end, right? Because I want us to get through this form. But at the end is what we're really thinking around. We haven't talked about the police because I think I've hinted at my thoughts around it. What do we think about for them, right? But for whatever is left that we might think we might want them to do or not. But I think we need to have that conversation. And I agree with you. And I think today is to see how far we can get through this with the eye toward having a couple of people begin to craft us into a message that is not like this, with a series of questions, but a series of statements relative to what it is the CSWG wants to see happen in this community. And getting through this with our commentary is important for us. Otherwise, we can't get to the next step. And I can't say this strongly enough that we only have a couple of weeks. And I think we have enough information. Certainly enough sentiment behind us to come up with something. But we have to get this in place to the town manager and so that he can actually have an opportunity to consider and support what we're doing. Right now, we're not there. And that's why I'm pressing this now to get us to a point where we can do it. The sentiment, I feel it myself. So it's not about that. We've only got a couple of weeks until, and I want to ask Mr. Bachman at some point when he actually needs us from us so that we can start work in this process. We can talk about it for as long as we want, but if we don't put something forward, then we haven't done our charge. So I'd like to go to question five, please, if we may. This one, it was very heavily weighted in one direction. Again, commentary would be important from our group. It seems like we have, like I said, is leaning very strongly in one way, but we do have to create a document. Mr. Vernon Jones and then Ms. Pat. Well, clearly in number C, we're talking about a lot more than four. So we're talking enough for 24-7. Other than that, I think we're close to consensus, and if we're not, we should hear about it now. Ms. Pat. So for the sake of time, it looks like majority of us want question number five. If we start going into deep discussion, it might take longer tonight. So I don't know how people are feeling, but I'm OK with the result that we have, leaning to our group, 42. I don't know who had their hand up first, Miss Owen or Ms. Ferrara. Ms. Ferrara had her hand up first. Ms. Ferrara, then Ms. Owen, thank you. Yeah, mine is really quick. I agree too. We don't need to spend time discussing this. The only thing that I wanted to say is in terms of making sure that there's a separate number two for Crest, right? So there'll be the nine on one that will dispatch it and do an assessment, but they should also have their own separate number, as they'll have their own separate space and have their own kind of separate program. That's it. Thank you. Miss Owen. That was actually my comment too, was that the numbers being separate. Were you trying to copy Ms. Ferrara? Something like that. No, something like that. Yeah, understood. Yeah, and I'm pushing this a bit because I think, as Ms. Ferrara and I were talking about this, we had a lot of the sentiment. This is also the time for folks who didn't get a chance to respond in writing to the actual grid that was put forth behind the work of Mr. Vernon Jones. They said this would be a better format to do this. So we want to hear what you have to say. And our goal will be to incorporate this information in a document that we're going to put together. This is our group talking to the town. So I want us to be very purposeful and forceful about it, make sure we get all the comments in there. So that's question five. Thank you. It was heavily weighted and I appreciate the additional comments. Let's go on to six. Again, this is one of those. And there's people who may have had no leaning or didn't get an opportunity to speak to this. This would be the opportunity to do so. Ms. Ferrara and then Ms. Pat. So yeah, I definitely agreed with everything besides E, in terms of the diversity, equity, inclusion for the town. I don't know if some of you all know or not. I was a Chief Diversity Officer at UMass for quite many years, so I definitely know what that job entails. So for me, why I said no leaning is because I wouldn't want a position to be created in town just in name only, because I've been in that position, right? It would have to be a position that actually has power, has resources, has staff, and is able to do something. Because if not, you just set up that person for failure. And just to say that someone's there, but they're not doing much. So that's the only reason why no leaning. I would have to hear what the town. I'm in support of it, obviously. I'm in support of having a diversity officer. But that person or that position would have to have the power, the resources, that's what I meant. Ms. Pat. So what I want to say very quickly is that I want to applaud the town manager for taking the initiative to create, is it a committee, to look into issues of homelessness? So my question is, do we still have to recommend this? Because the town manager is already working on this. I'll circle back to Mr. Bachmann. And second, I also had a comment on this, is that I think that this is a systemic question for me. I think at one point I was at no leaning on this, because we're talking about a youth center, and we talk about a town office with diversity, equity, inclusion, and we talk about cultural, multicultural center. These are more global kinds of things which absolutely support our youth and young people and BIPOC people in this community. And housing, which is a whole big issue that's still getting batted around in our town. So this is a question that has a lot to do with safety and security of our community. So I'm not sure to what extent I want to put energy into this one, as opposed to other issues around safety. And maybe if you wouldn't mind, Mr. Bachmann, I'll go to you to see if you have a comment, a response. Actually, Ms. Walker had her hand up, too. Oh, I lost my screen again. I'm sorry, I got a couple of screens. Ms. Walker, I'm so sorry. Thank you. It's OK, thank you. So I just wanted to agree. I think this section is actually also extremely important, and I think it may require more in-depth conversation. I apologize for the background noise. And I think that these things are absolutely like the BIPOC community depends on these things also for safety. And then just as a response to Ms. Pat's question, like I also am very happy that the town manager implemented a group, but I do think it's so important for us to address it just because it isn't always that the BIPOC homeless community is going to be centered or focused in that work. And I still think it's our responsibility to consider them in this because it does encompass their safety as well that may not necessarily be addressed or a focus of the other group. So I don't think we need to spend extensive time on it, but I do think it should be something that we consider. Mr. Bachmann, I said come back to you. Your name was raised a couple of times in those questions. No, I agree with Ms. Walker. And I think that if you didn't include it, I think people would say, did you forget us? And I think this isn't crucial to your mission as well. Thank you. So I'm conscious of the time. I'm actually looking at it at 7.38. I'm willing to keep moving with this a little bit to see how far we get. Are any objections to that with the group? We're all good for a minute. OK, thank you. So Ms. Marci, we can move down to what other proposals? I'm raising my hand. Oh, God, I didn't see. Oh, God, I was moving too fast there, Ms. Pat. Go ahead. Very quickly, I just want to let the rental assistant, the town is already doing that. My problem with that particular one is that it's been contracted out to an agency that is led by White that I had sent some people, and I don't want to be too specific, to apply for rental assistance because of cultural ignorance, some bifurc families, low income that need the funding didn't get it. So that's where I will stop, because I do help people as part of volunteer work. And it hasn't been very successful. So I would like the rental assistant program to turn back to the town, find a local organization or whatever, local, instead of somewhere in Greenfield. That's all I have to say. Thank you. Sorry, I missed you, Ms. Pat. Just a lot of screens going on here. But thank you for that. Know the comments. We can move to what other proposals would you like to add? And you can scroll it down a little bit. Thank you, Ms. Moyston. Question one, there was broad agreement on that. There was no leaning. Is there any discussion? People want to comment on that now before we move forward in our discussion. This is about multiracial teams, appropriate expertise, clinical, mental health, social work, who are unarmed and respond as needed. I think this goes back to an earlier issue, certainly about training of people who would be interacting with our community outside of the police department. Any comments from folks? Hold on a second, Ms. Walker? I think I may have been the person that was no leaning. And I think my no leaning was due to the two person. Just because I was unsure if that would be sufficient because I wanted more research before I decided if it was a two person job. But I do agree with the rest of the sentence, just not the number of people that was assigned to it. I'm just unsure about that. Certainly. Thank you. Yeah. Ms. Ferreira. Sorry, I was muted. Yeah, I think the same thing with me in terms of I'm in agreement with what Ms. Walker said. But I think that in terms of what other proposals would you like to add, I think that that's a separate thing, Mr. Wiley, in terms of so is that are we going to come back to that at the end? What other proposals we'd like to add? Yeah, I just think these, yeah. OK, so we'll do that at the end. We'll just keep going. I'm going to these questions, actually, and I read that statement. So yeah, so question one, question two. Thanks for you. Mr. Vernon Jones. And then Ms. Pat. I'm sorry, we already did this. No, we haven't done that. We haven't gone through everything on it. But a lot of them, we do have agreement. So I think we could probably go through it pretty quickly. But there's a couple that are not that we do need to discuss. With regard to question one, many of the programs that we've read about have a medic as part of the team. And I would like to ask the town manager to have a conversation with the fire department about whether it appears to them that that would be useful in terms of what the needs are in the community or whether the medical stuff is all taken care of by our ambulance crews. And we should be focusing on just mental health clinicians and social workers. Mr. Bachman could explore that and come back to us with some information. I think that would be helpful. Would you be able to do that for us, Mr. Bachman? Thank you. And I apologize, I think, for the confusion. I contributed to that by asking that earlier question about other proposals. That was a separate thing, Ms. Forever. Thank you for pointing that out. These are about community responders for equity, safety, and service, press-related. So that's where the first question came from. The second question we're on right now, and Mr. Severn Jones has made a request which Mr. Bachman will be following up on. Other comments on question two? Ms. Walker has her hand up. Yep. I do think it will be helpful to get that information from Mr. Bachman, but I also do just want to say that I personally think that I can't think of a specific incidence, but it may like there are some mental health crises or other crises that may require medics. And so I don't think that those things necessarily should be separated. Yeah. OK. Ms. Forever. Yeah, I think when we were doing the research and I was doing the research, that's what the teams always had like a medic. And then social work, mental health. I think that that's stuff that we can still kind of work through. But I'm still in agreement with question one in terms of it being multiracial teams and so on and so forth. Unarmed? Yeah, it's multiracial. And also I wanted to offer two, in some ways, multilingual, where it's appropriate. I mean, I think we have to look at, we have a multilingual community. And certainly Spanish and English have taken precedence, but we have other languages that we have to be aware of and can we effectively respond. But that's a detail going down the line, but certainly something we can put forward as we begin to write this up. So may we move on to question three? You all can read that. There was all kinds of agreement here. Again, I want to remind folks that this is just information that came from people who responded in writing. It may have been some of you who did not have an opportunity to do that or prefer to present verbally in this format. So this would be the opportune time to do that if you have comments, and I'll recognize folks. Nothing? Question four? Teams call for assistance from the APD and the Amherst Fire Department ambulance and whenever is needed. This seems to be related to other pieces of what we're talking about. Any comments on that? Again, this was a higher agreement area and it doesn't include folks who did not have a chance to respond in writing. Mr. Balkeman, I would just suggest until question six, just to have people just read it and then whoever has any comments, just make comments so we can end up because of the time. Yeah, we're just looking down the line. Question five? Comments? This is another one. Question six? Question seven? Ms. Ferrerra. Yeah, so I was one of the no leanings with this one. And I think we've talked about it, right? Because I really think it needs to be 24-7 because I would not want the police dealing with any of these types of issues. And that's why we need 24-7 program. Thank you, Ms. Walker. Just because I was also one of the no leanings on this question, I wanted to amplify what Ms. Ferrerra said because that was also my exact reasoning. Thank you. Any other comments before we move on? Question eight? You can scroll down a little bit, Ms. Moisten. There's only one leaning to disagree in the B section of this question, and I don't know if anyone wants to comment on that or people who didn't want, didn't put anything in writing, Ms. Pat. So I believe I'm the one who did lean into disagree. Yes, we need a more robust discussion about connecting people to social services because sometimes it might be harmful, even though we're trying to do good. So I have been a foster parent, and I know as much as the system wants to help kids, sometimes it's not a perfect solution and you can't use poverty, social class to refer. But anyway, I think we need a more robust discussion on this. We don't have enough time tonight. So I have a mixed feeling about how we refer people because that's the traditional system we currently have. I mean, that's what the school system does, for example. So we just have to be cautious about that. Thank you, Ms. Walker, and then Ms. Owen. So I actually just wanted to... So I think I was agreeing on this one, but now that I have heard Ms. Pat speak, I actually fully agree with what she's saying, and I don't think that in most cases, it might not even be helpful to connect them to social services. So I think it should be like... I mean, I also agree it deserves more conversation, but I think it should be like on a case-by-case basis and there should be more evaluation and thought going into that than just we connect clients to social services. Yeah, there are side issues for a lot of folks being connected immediately to institutional pieces of our support system. So I would tend to agree with that as well. Ms. Owen, you had your hand up? Yeah, I just wanna agree with what everyone's saying. And I think that with dealing with social services, everybody's case is a little bit different. As a foster alumni myself, I can speak for myself and say like the Department of Children and Families really doesn't prioritize wellbeing. So I think it's really important for this program to be connected with community resources and nonprofits that may be able to fill the gaps in the services that that family or young person or whoever is being referred might need. Thank you. Mr. Brenna Jones. Well, I like this emphasis on things being on a case-by-case basis, but why don't we simply delete B and understand that it's something that the program will have to work out on a case-by-case basis to best meet the needs of their clients. Okay, we'll let that question sit in the air for a moment. Mr. Brenna Jones, if you don't mind and the Ms. Ferrer. Yeah, I mean, I think I've heard everyone's kind of viewpoint and I agree with whether, for certain circumstances, that's gonna be the case, but I do agree more so with a case-by-case because I think these are gonna be, hopefully, right? We're gonna hire some veteran folks that are gonna be able to be making assessments, engaging, right? Engaging with the person, asking them, because I also see where it can be harmful if you are helping a person and they do need help, right? Because I have an elderly mom, right? And when she has different health issues, I need to connect with the service, you know what I'm saying? But I'm doing it in an empathetic, in a helpful, in a healing way, right? And I'm connecting her and she's getting the benefit, right? So that's what I would hope would happen, right? These are the type of people that are gonna be hiring people that are empathetic, you know, that are compassionate and understand and are not gonna be racist and just putting people into institutions to harm them, you know? So I think that's the thing is to not just say, okay, this is not good. It's an assessment and hiring people that actually know what they're doing and doing it in the right way to provide the people services they need. Thank you all very, very much. You know, we're at the end of this. There's still more work to do with this. Certainly there's still more thought and discussion that needs to get to this. Mr. Vernon Jones, I will take your comment or question and Ms. Ferreras, and then I wanted to speak directly to Mr. Backelman. Well, I really appreciate that Mr. Backelman working on the financial end of things. There are a lot of details to be figured out about implementing this program. And I would like us to request that the town manager begin if or continue if he's already begun to work out the operational details of what will it take to actually implement what we've put out here. Okay, let me float that to you Mr. Backelman and I'm gonna, I'll join with a comment in a moment. Someone else had, I forget, I'm losing Ms. Ferreras, yeah. So what about the other proposals and things like that? I mean, are we gonna table that to another discussion or because obviously I think there's, like for me, I still have questions and things like that and other ideas and proposals and stuff like that. That may be related to what I was gonna say and you'll tell me if it isn't for sure. But let me just say one of the closing remarks on this piece of our work I wanted to say is that there's two things I wanted to ask Mr. Backelman for when the, you know, we're gonna be putting together a substantive and well articulated proposal to you using our own resources and maybe the input from our, certainly our consulting group. When would you need something from us now that you've extended the deadline for you to absorb it and actually be able to understand it and articulate and hopefully support you know, our proposal to the town council. So that date would be important for us to know. And the other thing I think may be related Ms. Ferreras, I'd like to ask in this group for a couple of people to work on a document that would be a proposal that collates and pulls together the information we've just talked about with Cress so that we can begin to be more concrete with what we're requesting, what we're proposing to the town manager so that we give him information in a timely manner. So those are my two things. I don't know if that's related Ms. Ferreras because that may be a place where we can put your question you know, where do we get more discussion? I think if we articulate, I'm thinking if we can articulate the document we ourselves can have that discussion before we further discussion before we submit it to the town manager. That's my thought. Anyway, Mr. Bachmann. Thank you, Mr. Wiley. So I think the best case scenario at this point is if the working group actually voted a motion at your next meeting. That means someone could work on a motion. I mean, you will have then have already, well, depending, so I think if you could vote a motion at your next meeting with what you're and you have the framework, I think that you've just gone through the things so you could make that motion as long as you want but or make it succinct and say, here's the immediate budget implications because that's what I need today as soon as possible. You have until, I think we said May 15th for the final report. And so then you have time to, some time to pull that together with your consultants. The other question I have for you and the working group is when you would like to appear before the council? We've tentatively scheduled that for May 17th but they also meet May 14th and they also meet during June. So if you can talk about that for next week, what, when you would like to, you know, I assume that the working group will want to make a presentation, a public presentation to the council based on its work and whatever fits into your schedule, they meet Monday nights at 6.30. So, Mr. Bachmann, you have to, on May 1st, you have to present, be able to present something to the town, correct? Correct, correct. So just working backwards, anything we wanted to submit to you in writing, motion related or otherwise, has to be received by you when? I'm asking that by May 21. May 21? Yep. Okay, my assumption, it was a lot earlier. Well, I mean, you don't have another meeting between now and then. I mean, if you can vote tonight, that'd be ideal. Oh, you said May 21, I'm sorry. Oh, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, April 21, my bad. Oh, yeah, okay, yeah. So, May 21, yeah, I could go that way out. So, May 21. No, April 21, no, May 21 was wrong. April 21 is when you need to hear something from us. Okay. I guess in line with that, I wanna go back to having a couple of us work on something that could be, well, let me stop there, let me go back. Ms. Walker, let me take your comment and then I'll go back. So, I think I was going to suggest something similar to what you were gonna say. I was going to say in light of this information, I would suggest if it's possible to have a subcommittee work on like an outline for a document or a draft of a document that we can present to the town manager with like a basic outline of what we have right now that can be presented to the whole group at our next meeting. I don't know if it would be possible to have a subcommittee meet on Monday. And draft a document that we can finalize on the 21st. Well, I, you know, certainly the sooner the better. And, you know, here it is, it's Wednesday evening. And we do need to pull our resources together to get something in writing. And if we're gonna be put anything in motion form, we have to have it ready for the town manager earlier than later. I'd be happy to work on something with someone. I've got a full log on already, but I think we need a couple of people working on something to get us a foundation before we move forward. Mr. Vernon Jones. I'd be happy to be part of working on it. Ms. Owen. I'd also be happy to be working on it. Well, that Ms. Walker. I was also going to state the same thing. I don't know if we need or want four people working on it, but I would also be happy to work on that. Well, given the load that's come in my way as chair, I think we'd probably be best off having two folks work on it. And those two folks can guide us with whatever information we need to look at and get feedback to them in a short turnaround. So if that's working well, you know, Mr. Vernon Jones and Ms. Owen, are you willing to work on this together? Yeah. Yes. I assume we're talking about both emotion and a somewhat more detailed draft report. Exactly. There's the motion and the draft report so that we can have that ready on the 21st. Oh, wait. Ms. Carrera. But I guess what does... I thought Mr. Bachman said he needed it was emotion. So I don't know why you want to give yourself more work. He needs a detailed motion by the 21st. So the motion should have what our recommendations are for the budget, right? What's going to have budget implications. It doesn't need the report yet. That's going to be on May 15th. So I think we want to just be focused, right? And you all could work on a draft motion with our recommendations so that we can review that on the 21st and discuss it and... I think that's what we're asking. Maybe it's not well articulated, but is that accurate, Mr. Bachman? Yes. Yeah. That's it. Yeah. The motion is what's the key piece. And I do think you have the outlines already decided. We do, yeah. Yeah. Ms. Pat. So with the motion, are we going to also be including what we think the budget will cost? What our proposal is going to cost? Because we can make as much motion as we want if we don't put dollar amount into it, then what's the point? Mr. Vernon Jones. I think our responsibility is to recommend the programs that we need. And it's the town manager's job to figure out what it costs. I would agree with Mr. Vernon Jones on that because I think our job is to put together the substance and the nature of the program so that it's well articulated and understood what the needs are and let that be the weight behind putting a cost to those. Ms. Pat and then Ms. Walker and then Ms. Ferreira. No, I'm sorry. Ms. Pat, Ms. Ferreira and then Ms. Walker. So I hear what Mr. Ross said and I do appreciate what the town manager has done with what you sent to us. Was it today or was it yesterday? I had some questions around that budget and I look at it, I feel that that wouldn't be enough for one year first responder or whatever we call it. I feel that, you know, that should be more amount more than what you have, you sent to us, for example. So I, the point I'm trying to make is that we should have some input in whatever you'll present to us. I just don't want any of the programs to fail. That's my anxiety. And I think I said, Ms. Ferreira and Ms. Walker, I'm not sure about that order. Ms. Ferreira? Yeah, for me just to clarify, I mean, I just, you know, want us to kind of focus on the recommendations right now and then, you know, be it as deep, you know, kind of be as specific as possible what we're doing, you know, that we want it to be sustainable. We want it to have the right, you know, resources, the comprehensive resource, things like that. But like Mr. Wilde was saying, I'll get back down with the budget right now because then we can put our reasoning for those things in our proposal and our report we have to give later. All right, now I think it's going to be important to just focus on these other things that we're recommending and be, you know, kind of detailed about what we're recommending and making sure that it's fully resourced in fact. Just saying those words, right? Fully resourced, sad for whatever we're recommending and sustainable. Ms. Walker? So I also just need a little bit of clarification. I'm a little bit confused because my understanding of it was a little bit opposite because I thought the budget deadline is first before our recommendations are due. And so at the presentation that Mr. Bachman gave to the town council, he did state to them that he was going to be giving them the recommendations for the budget first and that they would then later receive our recommendations that go along with the amount of money he set aside for our work. So I actually in opposition believe that we need to have some sort of estimate or rough idea as to how much each recommendation will cost before we even figure out the final, exactly how the recommendations will be set because the budget and the numbers come out first. So we can say we want, you know, a community responder program. The estimated cost of this is 700 K as per Mr. Bachman's breakdown. And then we go into detail as to what the functioning of that program is later and after. Thank you, Ms. Walker. So, Ms. Pat. I know it's late, you know, for us but I strongly feel that we should actually address the budget in order for us to make recommendations. I mean, we've gone through all this list. I think we should have a subcommittee and I'm willing to volunteer. Maybe if somebody else wants to work with me something very rough so that we have idea of what we're talking about because we can make as many recommendations as we want. And if the town council or town manager say we're not going to fund it, what is the point of people making any recommendation if they're not going to fund the different projects? So I think it's very critical that we know how much we're talking about to start some of these programs. And I'm talking about the youth program. I'm talking about the cultural center. I'm talking about the inclusion officer and so on. I think it's very critical that we come up with dollar amount. I feel strongly about it. Here's a question related to that and then I'll go to you, Ms. Pereira, then Ms. Walker. My question about that is if we're asking Mr. Vernon Jones and Ms. Owen to come up with an outline for what it is we're trying to put forward and we are able to articulate that in a way to Mr. Boncoman and maybe this is a sorry question to you, Mr. Boncoman. Does that inform by its very nature the cost of what this may be? We can put some costs to it and estimates but would the description of the program and the nature and substance of the program be enough to establish some budget guidelines for you? Yes. So that's where I'm going. I think it's part of being able to articulate that rather than us put numbers on it, we put substance on it and see where it goes. Mr. Vernon Jones and I think Ms. Pereira, Ms. Pereira then Mr. Vernon Jones, I think it was that way. Ms. Walker, how's her hand up? Oh gee, Ms. Walker, sorry. Yeah, it's hard to see. Maybe she needed to lower it, I don't know. Ms. Walker. Hi, yes, hi. So I actually think I disagree and I think it would be in our best interest as a group to present budget estimates at least because although Mr. Boncoman states that with that information, he would be able to come up with recommendations. I do also like he sits in all of our meetings and stated at our last meeting that he has no idea what we're looking at and what a budget like that would entail and the town council also in their last meeting was very surprised at the amount of money we spent on consultants. And so that is also very indicating to me that they are not anticipating the amount of money that we are really going to be asking for. And so I think it is critical for us to be realistic with the numbers because they're not anticipating it. Like I can already tell you by the responses that I have seen widely by the town manager and the town council that they are not anticipating this costing a lot of money and I think in order to avoid them, Nickel and Diming us that we should put vague at least they don't need to be very specific but vague at least estimates of what this would cost to be fully supported because I don't even think they understand what it means to fully support our community. So for us to expect for them to come up with those answers themselves is very unrealistic. I'm gonna take two comments, three comments when I end with Mr. Byrne Jones, Ms. Ferrara, Ms. Owen and Mr. Byrne Johnson. I'd like for us to settle on a charge for the people who are gonna be working on this and allow them to do their work if they wanna consider what we're putting forward about budget, fine, if not, I think they should be able to have the opportunity to get something to us and have us comment on it. Ms. Ferrara. Yeah, I mean, I hear Ms. Walker. I mean, I don't wanna disqualify it or anything like that. It's just that obviously we're at the 11th hour, right? At this point. So I guess my thing is what is it that we're going to need? And maybe we need to hear from Mr. Bachman again, because I guess I'm confused at this point too in terms of things, because we also can't rush this. We can't, for me at this point, unless the subcommittee is gonna say they're gonna be able to kinda look up, right? How each program is gonna cost between now and then, which, hey, if they have the willpower and the energy to do it in the way with all, go at it, you know? But we're at a point where we have to give something on the 21st, you know? So that's the thing, but obviously I wanna be most effective. So I hear Ms. Walker, what's she saying? So I guess I need to hear from Mr. Bachman again to find out, but before I can make a decision, ultimate decision, that's my concern. So let me go to Ms. Owen and then Mr. Vernon Jones and then Mr. Bachman, if you feel the need to make a comment at the end, I'd like to move this forward. Ms. Owen? I just wanna echo what Ms. Walker said about the town council thinking that we spent too much money on our consultants. I'm wondering if it's us overstepping to maybe ask our consultants to help me and Mr. Vernon Jones help budget these programs because they're doing research on them. So that way we can turn in a realistic budget because I think even just looking back at what Mr. Bachman turned in, that if we want fully restores experience staff, it might be a little bit more. And I think maybe the consultants could help, but I just don't wanna overstep. Mr. Vernon Jones, and then I'm gonna go to Mr. Bachman and I'd like to sum this up, please. Well, when Mr. Bachman sent us this, he invited us to identify anything he might have missed to our places where we saw it differently. And I'm not inclined to try to take over the role of ascertaining the cost of things, but I think all of us who think something has been underestimated in Mr. Bachman's budget for the Cres Program should write to him immediately with our suggestions and our amounts and CC the rest of the group. We can't then comment on each other's emails, but we can all let him know if we think more money is needed or it need to be budgeted and more experienced people. I'm not interested in our trying to do our own cost estimates, things like pensions and health benefits and all of that. So Mr. Bachman. I don't, unless there's a question, I don't have anything to add to this. Okay, okay, there's three more comments. People, we have to, I want to be sure we move this forward very quickly. We have to give our Mr. Vernon Jones and Ms. Owen an opportunity to work with this. Please make these comments. No, Mr. Wiley. What I was saying is that I do have that question, like I had posed that question to Mr. Bachman because I just want him to restate. Is it beneficial to give the budget, along with the motion that is going to be written? We're going to state our recommendations. That's going to have budget implications. Is it important that we also state how much each of those things are going to cost? I think I asked this a moment ago and I said, what would be most useful for us to articulate the nature and substance of this proposal, tell it what it is we need? And then, you know, so this is what we're saying. And then he's going to say, this is what this costs. And I think my, the answer I got was it, rather than putting numbers to it, we put substance to it and then apply the numbers. That was my understanding. I don't know if that's different than what you're saying, Mr. Bachman. Well, I think we have a set of numbers on the table that has been shared. If there are different numbers that need to come out, I think you've identified a lot of things. Some don't have numbers, some, the Cress program does. That's what this most attention has been given. So if that number has to be changed and so the, the recommend, the vote next week is about what you want, what's most relevant to the FY22 budget. You can add things and do things in your report, of course, because it's going to have more context and support from the working group. So. Ms. Pat, you had your hand up and then Ms. Walker. Okay. This is going to blow back on us that I will support whatever the majority is saying. It's late, everybody's tired. It's been a hard way for everybody. So there, I just have this feeling that our time is going to be wasted. I have this gut feeling that when it's presented to the town council, there will be, we don't have the money. So the sooner we know if we start throwing in budget around, then we go from there. But whatever we decide to net, I'll respect it because the group majority carries. So I'll respect that and get him pushed back, but we're doing it the other way around, backwards, I think. I'm not interested in presenting something when we don't even know if the town council or town manager is going to support the budget. I think my comment on that, Ms. Pat, is I understand the, certainly, and feel that sentiment, not absolutely. I strongly believe that we have an opportunity to make a statement here and it's not necessarily, not necessarily, although ultimately it is about dollars, but it's really about substance. And I think my sentiment around that is a lot of stuff that's been proposed in this town and other towns and cities is not substantive in a way that's compelling for people to believe that it's true. I think our job is to compel the town manager to see this as something that we value, it's something that we were asked to do. We were called to do this job, we're doing it. And if at some point, we feel like over the next few days wanna throw some numbers at it, that's fine. But I think if you articulate what it requires to do this, the numbers follow. And those numbers that we've seen earlier, will change. Will change if what we say needs to be done, needs to be done, and it could go from X to Y to Z. But we've gotta be able to save what is needed. And I fully respect and understand what you're saying. I have some of those doubts myself. So it's not like I'm there. Ms. Walker. Thank you. So I hear everybody and I respect and value everybody's input. I agree with Ms. Ferreira that our work is time sensitive and that makes it a little bit more difficult, but for that reason is exactly why I also think it's important for us to put the budget because for example, if we give our recommendations next week on the 21st, and then wait for Mr. Backelman to come back with the budget estimates that they come up with, we then don't have any time to make any recommendations to change anything that he comes up with. But if we set the precedent and give him our own rough estimates, then he then has something to work off of since we don't have time to correspond again thereafter. And also I hear Mr. Wiley saying that it should be done with substantive information about the program and then get the numbers. And I also agree with that. However, I still need Mr. Backelman to clarify after I'm done speaking, it was my understanding that that's not how this is going to work because of the fact that they moved the budget date back and that they are going to get the outline the budget with the numbers before they get our written report with the information in it. And I think that piece of information is critical to the way we move forward because if they were getting the explanation of the programs before the budget, I think that we would be able to have a different approach. And I do understand that this conversation is getting really late and we have to sign off, but Ms. Pat did say that she would be happy to work with somebody else to look at this. And I would be happy to work with Ms. Pat to look at this because I think it's very important. I think it's critical and I don't think it can hurt us at all to include it in the data. But I think it could possibly hurt us if we don't. I'd like to go to, and with all due respect to everyone and the time we're on Ms. Owen and Mr. Vernon Jones agreed to begin working on this. What would be most helpful from this committee for you all to begin this process? And how could we as a working group engage in this process as you're doing your work, Mr. Vernon Jones? Well, given what's just been said, I would propose that Ms. Owen and I develop a motion that describes the program and its features. And we plan to vote that motion, but that Ms. Pat and Ms. Walker go ahead and work on some numbers and costs and we can submit those to the town manager at the same time. I don't see them as part of the motion necessarily, but we may decide to vote those numbers too, but I think we need the motion to describe the program and if folks are able to work on some numbers to go with it, that could be part of what we submit to the town manager next week. Ms. Ferrer. Yeah, and I just wanna say to be clear, it was good to get all this for the discussion and when I heard Mr. Bachman speak again, I was wait, so Ms. Walker, you swayed me. I do think the budget needs to be included. Okay, so let me respond to that. So Mr. Vernon Jones and Ms. Owen will work toward bringing something forward in the form of a motion. Ms. Pat and Ms. Walker, I did that right. Be willing to examine and explore the budgetary implications for what would be going forward. And so let me ask the two of you as well, what would you need from this group? What would you need from our group as a whole to help inform your work? Ms. Pat. So basically, and I can't speak for Ms. Walker. So I'm thinking with the programs that we identified tonight, we'll start putting dollar amounts to them and then present it next week. Or maybe work with Mr. Ross and Ms. Owen. Ms. Owen, but then something like that, yeah. Yeah, I'm sorry, I mean, to speak to all of you. That's not right. My great hand button kind of disappeared. Is it okay if I pop it? Yeah, go ahead, Ms. Walker. So I agree with Ms. Pat. I think the only, the things that would be most helpful would be if we have, I mean, we already have the template that we have of all of our suggestions that we came up with together would be helpful. So we can just put numbers to every suggestion that we already have from our group. And then I don't know what Mr. Vernon Jones and Ms. Owen's timeline would be, but if they're able to complete their motion and send it to us, we can just look at what their motion is and what they're recommending and put numbers to those things. And that's the next question I had in terms of getting this in motion and us being supported as a group to the four people who are working on this right now. We need to have this information in front of the whole group, I think in time for us to take a look at it and absorb it to see if we have any other final comments or contributions. So I would yield to Ms. Owen and Mr. Vernon Jones and Ms. Pat and Ms. Walker to say, you know, my question is, can you have that to us, for example, by Tuesday morning or earlier? Yes. Yeah. Yes. Yes, yes. Was that a yes to the earlier? No, Tuesday. Tuesday morning. I think Tuesday morning. Okay, if you can give that to Tuesday morning, let's say 10 o'clock maybe, and we can get that in the loop to Ms. Moisten and then all of us, I would encourage us to respond as a group. I would expect everyone to have comment on that. Careful. Wait. So do you want us to just send it back to Ms. Moisten? Ms. Moisten. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Yeah, not to, don't send it to Mr. Bacchum and you don't want to hear this. So it's like you send it to Ms. Moisten as we usually do folks, of course, but don't be out of the loop in terms of making comments. All good? Okay. Thank you all for this, Ms. Owen, Mr. Vernon Jones, Ms. Pat, Ms. Walker, thank everybody for your comments and your extra work on this and we'll keep moving forward. I would like to, in the interest of time, we are very late, we're speaking for everybody saying that we're a little tired. I would like to just very quickly see if there are any upcoming events that you state them quickly and if not, you're thinking about something, just email to Ms. Moisten and you can circulate that. Let's go quickly forward, Ms. Owen. I saw that the Human Rights Commission is meeting next Thursday and that sort of an update on where a group is, is on their agenda in addition to a draft of support against police brutality to BIPOC communities. I'm gonna try my best to make it, but I think that we should all try to make an effort to go and I think for the second part of our charge on police oversight, maybe we could work in collaboration with the Human Rights Commission. The meeting's this Thursday. Oh, it's this Thursday? Tomorrow. Oh, guys. Yeah, it is this Thursday, thank you for that. If there are no others with our next meeting is going to be next Wednesday at 5.30. I'll Mr. Vernon Jones, I'm sorry. Well, this is not, this is, I'm afraid this is gonna be an unpopular comment, but I think it's very important that we not only have good recommendations, but we also have credibility with the public and with the town council. And we made a commitment that we were gonna meet with the chief of police for at least part of our meeting next week. And I feel very strongly that we need to keep that commitment that for us to have credibility with the town, we can't do all our work and then talk to the police. We have to talk to the police and hear from them before we finish our work. I agree. I left that up in the air based on what certainly Scott Livingstone said he's available at any time, given preference to the work we have to do, certainly on press and other things. And we're behind on that and that's part of our issue. If the group would like to have Scott Livingstone and his staff, as he talked about earlier, come and present to us, then I can certainly extend that invitation on behalf of the CSWG. We have to very carefully craft our agenda next time to be sure we have room for him and his staff for our consultant group and for the work that our four individuals on our committee are doing. So I'm all for that. And we need to have an extended, we have to extend the meeting beyond that time. I'm certainly I would ask Mr. Livingstone if he'd be able to come back another time, but we can start that next meeting if that's something that the committee would like to see. Thumbs up to invite Mr. Livingstone, Ms. Walker, Ms. Bowman. Can't see a thumbs up there, but I could hear a voice maybe that would be helpful. Yeah, sorry, I can't find my raise hand button. Okay, that's okay. Thank you. I will work on inviting Ms. Livingstone. Also, there's a proposal on what that discussion might look like, which I sent out earlier to folks several meetings ago. I'll resend it again. It's about the structure of that meeting timeframe. It might have to be modified a bit, but I'll send it out for you to comment on as well. Ms. Walker, I mean, Ms. Pereira. I guess, you know, since if we're gonna be meeting, talking about our recommendations and meeting with the chief, I would suggest kind of just saying to the consultants next week just to send a report for us, because I don't see us having all of that unless you're gonna extend, unless you want to extend the meeting right now and say we're gonna be meeting for four hours so that I'm ready. No, no. For four hours, because I think, you know, because if not what we're doing is just, we continue to like go over by an hour or two. And I think we know that it's not gonna work. You said I'm saying that three things, unless like I said, we're extending it by three of, you know, two hours. Great suggestion. Thank you, Ms. Pereira. And no, I'm not into four hours. I like you, but not like that. So I could request that of Dr. Shabazz and seven generations. And with that comment, please send me, if you will, through Ms. Moisten anything you want to be sure that they're written report for us next week is included. So that will make sure that they respond as some of your questions and concerns if that's okay. All good. So next week, 5.30, let's get our agenda items which are already pretty much in place will be Scott Livingstone and the work we're continuing to do with our subcommittees on the budget and the proposal. So those are the three option things. Thank you. I'm assuming there's no other topics because we've probably exhausted every topic there is to be said at this moment. And if not, I'd like to entertain a motion to adjourn. So moved. Thank you, Ms. Pat. Second. Thank you, Ms. Owen. Thank you all for the meeting. It is, we're now during your 8.32 p.m. Thank you for all your hard work and we'll continue going forward. We're making progress. Fiona, before you leave, could you give me your phone number? Yeah, of course. Thank you all. And I have you all, so Walker, right? Okay. Good night, everyone. Good night, Ms. Fatt. Good night, everyone. Good night, Ms. Pat. Good night. Okay. So my phone number is 413. 413. 230. 230. 07. Stop, stop. No. 07. Oh, it's recording. Well, it's not so much that it's recording that it's attendees. I kind of thought that perhaps you would share it through the chat. Oh, we don't have chat. I can just send it to you because I have it. Oh, okay. And would you send it to me so in my number too? I sure will. That will take me. That's great. I didn't realize it was on mute. I'm sorry, I kept trying to like, I was like, wait, how come you're not hearing me? Okay. We don't have a chat. Yeah. All right. Thank you. And Breanna, let's see if we can do this sooner rather than later. Definitely. Great. Okay. Good night. Good night. Oh, Ms. Moisten, I just had one thing. I'm going to try my best to be at the Human Rights Commission. I thought it was next Thursday for some reason. I can, I can try to come to tomorrow, but I just have a zoom that goes from six to seven. So I just might be a little bit late. Oh, that's okay. I can, yeah. Yep. All right. Thank you so much. Okay. Bye. Have a good night.