In the wake of the high profile police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis last month, Vermont lawmakers are moving ahead with criminal and racial justice reform legislation with hopes of passing a ban on chokeholds, mandating the use of body cameras and expanding the collection of traffic stop race data in the coming weeks.
The Senate is looking to approve the measures quickly, passing law enforcement reform bills by the end of June, but the House may not be able to move forward with the proposals until later in the summer, when lawmakers plan to return for a special budget session.
Sen. Dick Sears, D-Bennington, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said Tuesday his top priorities include mandating the use of body cameras for all law enforcement in the state and potentially prohibiting police chokeholds and other violent forms of restraint.
Sears added that he is also looking to quickly enact the justice reinvestment bill, S.338, which is aimed at reducing the population of incarcerated Vermonters and investing the savings in strategies to improve public safety.
The Senate will also look at incentivizing law enforcement to collect and report race data from traffic stops, by tying compliance to grants from the state. “Those are my big priorities to get through right now,” he said.
Sears admitted that trying to pass the proposals in two weeks is a “tough time frame” but said the Senate would do its best “to make it.” He added he would be meeting later in the week with other judiciary and government operations committee chairs — from the House and Senate — to make sure both chambers are on the same page.
The tight turnaround on the racial justice reform legislation caused friction in the Senate Monday when Sen. Debbie Ingram, D-Chittenden, criticized Sears for allegedly planning not to seek input from as many stakeholders as possible, and relying on the help of “one young black intern” to craft legislation curbing law enforcement’s use of force.
Ingram’s attack on Sears came after the Judiciary Committee chair had said he was concerned about how much work his panel could accomplish in order to move a bill in just two weeks. Sears said he was glad that Skyler Nash, a University of Vermont student who has worked as an intern for both the Judiciary and the Joint Legislative Justice Oversight committees, had agreed to help work on the bill.
On Tuesday, Nash told VTDigger that he had decided to recuse himself from working on the proposals with the Senate Judiciary Committee.
“She wasn’t necessarily wrong in responding to the way that Dick presented that — basically saying ‘oh well you know we’re rushing this through but we’ve got Skyler Nash to talk with us so things would be OK’ — and that’s not good enough,” Nash said.
“I don’t envision myself working hand-in-hand with the committee at this point,” added Nash, who is a member of the steering committee for the Vermont Racial Justice Alliance.
While Sears plans to start taking testimony on the use of force bill in the coming days, Speaker of the House Mitzi Johnson, D-South Hero, said Tuesday that her chamber will wait to take up what the Senate passes.
Before the Covid-19 pandemic struck Vermont, shutting down the economy and normal legislative business, the House had been working on its own police use of force policy, H.808 and H.464, but Johnson said she has decided to see what the upper chamber comes up with instead of taking action on the House bills.
Johnson said the decision was made in part to keep an agreement with House Republicans that the chamber would not take up bills that hadn’t passed out of committee before crossover — the March midpoint of Vermont’s legislative session.
But she said that the agreement does not apply to legislation that comes over from the Senate.
The House Speaker added she is open to all of the reforms discussed by the Senate so far.
“I looked at the list that they were talking about, and none of it seemed unreasonable,” Johnson said.
Johnson said criminal justice reforms are needed swiftly, particularly given the federal government’s aggressive response to protests around the U.S.
“The blanket statement is yes, we want to make as much progress as we can on these issues, especially considering the direction that the federal government is going and the total overreach of power, and the violence that the federal government is inciting,” Johnson said.
Rep. Anne Donahue, R-Northfield, the lead sponsor of H.808 — which would establish a uniform statewide policy and forbid use of force in cases where police instigated a dangerous situation, or failed to use de-escalation tactics — said in an interview that she thinks that moving forward with the use of force policy can wait until the next legislative session, in January.
Donahue added that with all the other tasks ahead of the Legislature in the coming weeks, including passing a budget, and allocating more than $1 billion in federal Covid-19 dollars, there isn’t much time to work on the policy.
“There isn’t the bandwidth to do it now, I don’t believe,” Donahue said. She added that making the change isn’t “massively urgent” for Vermont, pointing out that the state has one of the lowest crime rates in the nation, and in general fewer police-civilian interactions.
Rep. Brian Cina, P/D-Burlington, the lead sponsor of H.464, disagrees with Donahue and would like to see the lower chamber build upon what the Senate sends over. But Cina agreed that it won’t be possible to pass reforms before the July recess.
“The House and Senate need to figure this out — how quickly can we even do this — it’s going be tough,” Cina said. “What’s more likely going to happen is something this month, followed by something in August, followed by more stuff next year. I think that’s more realistic,” he added.
Among the other proposals Cina would like to see include prohibiting the use of tear gas or “other police interventions that are banned in war,” curbing the practice of 911 calls for non-emergencies, mandating that police officers who file false reports face greater consequences, and revoking certification from law enforcement officers convicted of a crime.
“Some of these other ideas might be too much for us right now but I think we need to have them queued up to look at whether it be August the next year,” he said.
Cina, along with other progressive lawmakers, is also planning to propose a 20% reduction in spending on the Vermont State Police’s budget for the upcoming fiscal year.
Cina said the plan would be to divert funds away from state law enforcement and towards investment in mental health crisis response services, increased support for survivors of domestic and sexual violence, as well as economic development investments in minority communities.
However, Johnson said that defunding the state police is “not a place that I want to go initially.”
“I’d like to see what exactly they’re proposing to cut from the police department,” the House speaker added.
“We have a very different law enforcement structure than a lot of other states. So that’s an example where they’ve taken sort of a national checklist of proposals, brought it to Vermont, and because of the very small size of our state and of all of our municipalities our law enforcement looks really different than it does in other states,” Johnson said.
