Editor’s note: This commentary is by Allen Gilbert, of Worcester, who is a former journalist, teacher, and ACLU-VT executive director. Last year he researched fatal police shootings in Vermont over the 50 years from 1970 to 2019. He has followed that up by examining the previous 50 years, from 1920 to 1969. He begins by noting 2020 was free of any police fatals, a major deviation that is more reflective of the early years he’s just finished studying. Gilbert recently published a book, “Equal Is Equal, Fair Is Fair,” on equity issues in Vermont.
For the first time in a decade, fatal police shootings in Vermont during the year just ended were zero. This was a dramatic decrease from what had been an extraordinarily high number – four in 2019, which was double the national average when adjusted for population. 2019 had, in fact, been the deadliest year in the deadliest decade for Vermont during the last 50 years.
But in another sense, zero deaths in 2020 was a return to what had once been the norm in Vermont. A search of articles in the Rutland Herald and the Burlington Free Press shows there were only four deadly police shootings in Vermont during the half century from 1920 to 1969. Three of the fatalities came during Prohibition in the 1920s, when federal agents gunned down “rum runners” and smugglers in three separate incidents along the Canadian border.
There was, in fact, only one instance of Vermont law enforcement officers killing a citizen during those 50 years. It was in 1967, during a robbery at a Burlington car dealership. This single death stands in sharp contrast to the 38 people killed by police in Vermont during the next 50 years, from 1970 to 2019. (One of these killings was done by a U.S. Border Patrol official as state police and federal agents pursued their target.)
It should be noted that there were also two killings in Vermont by military guards – one in 1921 at Fort Ethan Allen of a soldier being disciplined and another in 1947 in Shelburne during the pursuit of a soldier who had allegedly violated terms of his military parole. I list, but do not count, these two deaths in the log I keep of Vermont police fatals. Nor have I included the fatal shooting Oct. 12, 2020, by an on-duty Berlin police officer of his girlfriend. The Berlin officer killed himself after shooting her at her Barre Town apartment.
Over the last 100 years, the guard who shot the private at Fort Ethan Allen in 1921 may be the only enforcement officer in Vermont to have been tried and sentenced to jail for using force that resulted in the death of an individual; the sentence was for two-and-one-half years.
Reading through the news accounts of Vermont police shooting deaths over 100 years yields few clues why the use of deadly force by law enforcement skyrocketed in the last 50 years, particularly in the 2010s. Only one thing seems likely: Had there been no Prohibition, with its deadly federal enforcement of liquor laws and smuggling, Vermont would have had no fatal police encounters at all between 1920 and 1967. It seems evident that tough enforcement of an unpopular – and widely violated law – incited violence that led to killings.
As to why the rate of fatals shot up starting with the 1967 Burlington robbery, spiked with five killings in the 1970s before receding to three in the 1980s and then four in the 1990s before hitting nine in the 2000s and exploding to 17 in the 2010s – there is no clear answer. What happened particularly in the 2010s – when fatals in those 10 years surpassed total killings in the previous 90 years – is difficult to parse.
It’s true that Vermont’s population in 2019 was nearly 80% higher than in 1920 (628,000 vs. 353,000). It’s also true firearms are more powerful and accurate now than they were 100 years ago. Statistics on the number of Vermont police officers over these same years isn’t available, but it’s almost certain there are many more.
I would suggest that awareness in Vermont last year of how high police fatals had risen created the drop that occurred in 2020. The state faced a violence it hadn’t been aware existed. Added to that was national attention on police use of force resulting from the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others. The proclivity of Vermont police to resort quickly to deadly force rather than try less-violent means first seems to have been tempered.
Whatever the reason for the change, Vermont has begun a conversation about police use of force – a subject that for too long has been cloaked in murky interpretations of cloudy U.S. Supreme Court decisions. The Legislature passed a new use-of-force law in 2020 that could – if implemented fairly – result in one of the most progressive use-of-force laws in the country. And such a law could lead to the most important result that’s been eluding us for decades — fewer unnecessary deaths at the hands of law enforcement. It would be a return to what was once the norm in Vermont.
