Bennington town leaders have preliminarily approved the formation of a local police advisory and review board, but the board would not have oversight of complaints against Bennington police, as the town intended.
The Bennington Selectboard voted unanimously Monday to approve a draft resolution establishing the town’s first Community Police Advisory Review Board. The vote came after a nearly hourlong discussion of the new board’s responsibilities — particularly its scaled-back role in reviewing complaints against local police, now that the board has been advised that state law sharply limits the extent of its authority.
“I’m not terribly happy about that, but it’s where we are,” Selectboard member Tom Haley said at the meeting. “I think it’s the best we’re going to get right now under state law.”
A Bennington task force, assigned to envision the role of the citizens board, offered its final recommendations in February. Designed to build trust and transparency between residents and local police, the recommendations center on how the Bennington Police Department should handle citizen complaints against it and how the advisory board would be involved in the process.
Among them: that the Bennington police chief should provide the advisory board with updates on his investigation of complaints and that the board should review the police chief’s findings before deciding whether it agrees with the conclusion. During the board’s review, it could ask to see evidence related to the complaint, such as police body camera footage and witness interviews.
Margae Diamond, co-chair of the task force, told VTDigger that the police advisory review board’s ability to have access to information surrounding a complaint is “a key piece” of every community oversight group around the country that the task force researched.
But Bennington’s town attorney, after reviewing the task force recommendations, said earlier this month that Vermont law allows only the chief of police, town manager and selectboard members to have oversight of local police departments.
As a Dillon’s Rule state, Vermont municipalities receive all of their legal authority from the Vermont Legislature. And state law doesn’t explicitly allow the selectboard to delegate to a citizens board its authority to review internal police investigations.
“An advisory committee could never have its own investigative authority or have its own decision-making authority,” the town’s legal counsel, Merrill Bent, said in an interview. “It would have to make recommendations to the selectboard.”
Until state law changes — or Bennington changes its town charter — civilian oversight of the Bennington Police Department’s internal investigations ultimately rests with the selectboard, according to Bent.
Revised role
The police advisory review board’s current role in reviewing complaints merely involves developing a database that would help it to analyze aggregated, anonymous complaints. Members would not be able to see specific complaints or details about those complaints, as the task force had envisioned.
The board also would not be able to observe how an investigation moves along or provide case-by-case feedback on the police chief’s investigation.
Diamond said she is “stunned” the Bennington Selectboard didn’t know that state law limits what the local police advisory review board can do until the task force concluded months of work. “It was the selectboard’s responsibility, as they crafted the task force and gave us a charge,” she said.
At the meeting Monday, Selectboard member Bruce Lee-Clark apologized to the task force, which worked for nearly half a year on fleshing out the police advisory review board.
“I don’t think, if I was a member of the task force, this was the step that they were hoping for,” Lee-Clark said, “and I apologize for that.”
In an interview, Selectboard Chair Jeannie Jenkins said that even before the task force was formed, selectboard members had started talking to various people about Bennington’s plan to establish a police advisory review board. She said the people they consulted included legislators, staff at the Vermont Attorney General’s Office and officials in Burlington and Brattleboro, which both have community police oversight groups.
All of the task force meetings were also attended by a representative of the National Association for Civilian Oversight of Law Enforcement.
In all those discussions, Jenkins said, the limitations under state law on what Bennington’s police advisory review board could do never came up. She gives credit to the town’s legal counsel for flagging the issue, which Jenkins said caught her by surprise.
“We didn’t know to ask her to look at this,” Jenkins said. “She, on her own, wanted to make sure that she understood what authority we had over review boards.”
Steps forward
But the Bennington Selectboard has greenlit most of the task force’s other suggestions. Among them: The advisory board shall create another portal through which people can file complaints against Bennington police. Under the current system, complaints largely come through the police department’s office or website, which the task force said could make some people wary.
With the upcoming changes, the Bennington Police Department will also look into complaints that are filed informally, such as during conversations with a town official. Some complaints have not been investigated because they didn’t follow a specified process or format, according to discussions during the selectboard meeting on Monday.
The Bennington Selectboard is scheduled to take a final vote on the advisory board resolution on April 11, following another round of reviews by the Bennington Police Department, town legal counsel and Bennington’s town manager and assistant manager.
Establishing the board is part of ongoing efforts to reform the Bennington Police Department, which started after the agency was criticized for not properly handling the harassment of then-state Rep. Kiah Morris around 2016.
The town of Bennington hired the International Association of Chiefs of Police in 2019 to perform a comprehensive review of the police department’s policies and its relationship with the community.
The association made several recommendations in a report the following year, including that Bennington consider establishing a community advisory board that provides input on local police policy as a way to build residents’ trust.
Diamond and her co-chair on the task force, April Dunham, said they didn’t think the advisory board’s scaled-back role in assessing complaints against the Bennington police would make it an effective advocate for residents or local police.
“It’s really been stripped down to the bare minimum,” Dunham said. “Unfortunately, I don’t think it’s going to be enough to really make a change.”
Diamond said she feels that the task force let people down, especially community members who spoke to her group despite their skepticism that any meaningful change could happen. She said the task force had to convince many people to share their thoughts — the same community members who she said had also participated in previous Bennington police-related studies that didn’t result in action.
Jenkins and Lee-Clark said they are encouraged by the steps Bennington can take through its forthcoming citizens board, but they said they are also disappointed at the board’s shrunken role in reviewing police complaints.
They and other Bennington Selectboard members said they’d like to see changes in state law that would authorize the Community Police Advisory Review Board to take over the complaint reviews.
“The selectboard really has no interest in being that body,” Jenkins said. “We would all be very, very pleased to have a CPARB take over that function.”
Bennington officials are encouraging community members to ask state legislators for help, especially Sen. Dick Sears, who represents Bennington County and chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee. The current legislative session is more than halfway over. But Sears told VTDigger his committee might be able to find a solution it can include in H.729, a bill on miscellaneous judiciary procedures.