BURLINGTON — The special committee established to review the city Police Department following a series of excessive use of force incidents will be asking for an extension to its end-of-November deadline for policy recommendations.
The 14-member committee has met six times, but has primarily been gathering information from the department in wide-ranging discussions. Recommendations to the City Council aren’t imminent, committee chair and police commissioner Randall Harp said.
Harp said during a Tuesday night committee meeting that he would be asking the City Council for more time, but said he did not know how much.
Councilor Joan Shannon, D-South District, is on the committee and said she felt the committee has been making lateral progress.
“I think there is a process of collecting information and vetting things that kind of doesn’t look like forward progress, but maybe we have to do some lateral work before we make forward progress,” she said.
The committee was established by the Burlington City Council in June after two federal lawsuits were filed against the department alleging police brutality. Body camera footage from the incidents showed officers pushing and tackling the African American men who filed the suits.
Those lawsuits were filed just months after the death of Douglas Kilburn, a Burlington man whose death was ruled a medical homicide after he was punched by Officer Cory Campbell in an altercation at the University of Vermont Medical Center. Attorney General TJ Donovan announced last week that he determined Campbell’s actions were justified.
In its six meetings, the committee heard presentations from the department on its internal and external organization structure, recruitment, training and use of force policies.
The committee still plans to discuss the department’s disciplinary process, police information disclosure policies, civilian oversight structures, wellness programs to support officers and data collection.
Harp said while he was unsure how much longer it would take the committee to finish its work, he did not think it should be more than a year. He said he believed the committee was making progress.
“We are continuing to get new information that will inform the recommendations we would eventually make,” he said. “We are continuing to discuss new things, which I think does get us closer to providing recommendations in the end.”
Shannon said she felt like the end of January or early February would be a good time frame for the committee to wrap up its work.
“Especially with a committee this large, just for everybody at the table to have a few minutes of airtime at each meeting, the end of November was probably never realistic for a committee of this size,” she said. “But there’s still a limit to how much time should be allocated to this process.”
Councilor Perri Freeman, P-Central District, said the committee’s large scope means it will take time to work through the topics it is examining.
But she said she hopes the committee retains the sense of urgency the community was feeling when the body camera footage in the lawsuits became public this spring.
“I don’t want the committee, which will probably take a long time and be slower, fact-finding, community oriented, and get the community’s voice, to lose that sense of urgency,” she said.
Freeman said the council should continue to bring policy proposals forward on policing as the committee does its work.
BPD Deputy Chief Jon Murad said the department had spent a lot of time educating the committee about the department’s training and recruiting processes and the expectations and stressors officers face.
“We have not yet scratched the surface of all the things police do,” he said. “And yet we are asking these intrepid citizens to determine how the police are going to function.”
Murad said policing is something that takes a “career” to learn, but said committee members had seemed eager to learn and there was a role for community involvement in policing.
On Tuesday, the committee discussed some ideas for recommendations. These recommendations reflect the ideas of individual members of the committee, and may or may not be supported by the full committee in the end.
Suggestions included recommending programs that would provide incentives for officers to live in Burlington, encouraging the department to proactively reach out to minority communities and to do implicit bias testing of officers as part of the department’s hiring process.
Committee member Kevin Rodgers said he would be proposing a recommendation that increases the police commission’s oversight power over the department.
The committee’s lengthiest discussion surrounded committee member Carter Neubieser’s suggested recommendation that would cap the number of officers in the department at 100 and send additional funding to social service organizations. The department currently has 98 officers but is alloted 105.
“Investing in social services and direct services prevents crime, prevents interactions with police before they happen and before it’s a kind of interaction that may turn into a situation where an officer uses force,” he said.
Murad said that the idea of lessening the number of officers was “completely contrary” to community policing goals supported by some members of the community.
“The things that are being described right now in regard to a desire for community policing is not going to be accomplished by decreasing our headcount,” he said.
The committee tabled the discussion of the recommendations and is going to work through recommendations more in-depth at the end of its process, after covering the remaining topics. The committee also discussed and tabled whether or not to hire a consultant.
