The town of Bennington announced a settlement this week with Kiah Morris and her family following a yearslong investigation by the Human Rights Commission.
The commission was investigating the actions of the police department, and the town by extension, after Morris and her family experienced racist threats and harassment.
Morris represented Bennington in the Vermont House until 2018, when she declined to run for a third term because of continued harassment. Her family later moved away from Bennington.
The settlement requires Bennington to pay $137,500 to Morris’s family, which includes Morris, her husband James Lawton, and their son.
“We feel a statement is premature as it is not a finalized settlement,” Morris and Lawton jointly wrote in response to VTDigger’s request for comment.
The Human Rights Commission’s investigation had not reached a final, public phase when the settlement was reached, and elements related to the investigation have not been released to the public.
Board members voted to approve the settlement in executive session on Monday night. When they emerged, chair Jeannie Jenkins read the settlement for the record.
The settlement requires a public apology, which Jenkins read along with the rest of the agreement on Monday night.
“No one in Bennington should feel unsafe or unprotected,” Jenkins read on behalf of the board. “We have listened to Kiah Morris, James Lawton and their family in mediation. It is clear that Kiah, James and their family felt unsafe and unprotected by the town of Bennington. We have to do better by all persons who live in, work in or travel through the Town of Bennington irrespective of color, race, religion and other categories as protected by the law.
“The Town of Bennington apologizes to Kiah Morris, James Lawton and their family for the harms and trauma they encountered while residing in Bennington, and we fully acknowledge this reality. We pledge to learn, to do better and to protect all of our citizens.”
The settlement also requires the town to provide several services for Bennington residents.
It stipulates that the town must provide free space to Vermont Legal Aid or another free legal service for at least five years.
It also requires the town to continue work on police reform. Concerns about the way Bennington police, led by Chief Paul Doucette, handled Morris’s case prompted an outside review of the department, conducted by the International Association of Chiefs of Police. The town is now in the process of reforming the department’s policies and procedures.
Many residents — particularly advocates of racial justice who cite a pattern of discrimination by police — say the town needs to form a citizen board for police oversight. The settlement requires that the town continue to engage in a public process to that end.
Mia Schultz, who lives in Bennington and serves as president of the Rutland branch of the NAACP, is critical of the settlement. The total amount is not enough, she said, and in a Facebook post, she called the apology “weak.”
“This means to me that, once again, they can’t even admit that this is the result of systemic racism,” she said. “They can’t even do that in their apology. What are they apologizing for, specifically? Because Kiah felt that she was not safe? Kiah was not safe. And nobody did anything about it.”
“To me, as another Black person in Bennington, that was insulting,” she said. “And the amount of money that she received is insulting. It’s just not thought out. And it still has no accountability in there.”
Jenkins, the board chair, said she hopes the settlement allows Bennington to move forward.
“It was a horrific time in Kiah and James and their family’s life. It was a very, very hard time for the community,” she said.
She said she was pleased that Legal Aid will now have space in town, and that the settlement requires the town to continue working on police reform with the public.
“I think, in many ways, the good work that we’ve done on community policing since then, has been a result of what we learned about how we should come together as a community, and who we wanted to be as a community. And also the limitations of what law enforcement can do to help in these kinds of horrible situations.”
Schultz has maintained that any effective reform of the police department will require a change in leadership, and has pushed for a more swift move to citizen oversight of police.
She also said that the apology, which was issued at the end of a long meeting and well into the evening, at around 9 p.m., was not distributed to the public the way it should have been.
“There was nobody there. It was done in the dark of the night,” she said.
Jenkins said she regretted that the meeting had gone so long, and said the board took measures to ensure that anyone in the meeting prior to the board’s executive session could rejoin afterward. She said the board’s regular process is to include any executive sessions at the end of the meeting. Shortening the meeting would have excluded other important business, she said.
Schultz pointed to several other pending investigations and settlements the town has reached related to racial bias in the police department.
“We want to see real change,” Schultz said. “And we want to see a place where everybody is valued. And that’s what caring for your town is. It’s not an attack. That means we love this town.”
