The Bennington Selectboard has named the inaugural members of a citizen group that would have some oversight of the town police — the latest in a process aimed at reforming the Bennington Police Department.
The town’s Community Policing Advisory Review Board was established in April to build trust and transparency between residents and the police department, in response to shortcomings found in a 2019 assessment of the department.
Seven town residents were appointed to the advisory review board during a selectboard meeting on Monday. Four were chosen to serve until 2024: Robert Ebert, Will Greer, March Hudson-Knapp and Jeff Vickers. David Burch, Kelly Carroll and Scott Richmond will serve until 2025.
The citizen board’s tasks include reviewing aggregated, anonymous complaints against Bennington police to identify patterns. It also recommends new police policies and procedures, as well as additional training for officers in areas such as fair and impartial policing.
But these fall short of the responsibilities the town selectboard originally envisioned for the advisory review board, particularly reviewing individual complaints against the Bennington Police Department and determining whether it agrees with the police chief’s findings.
Selectboard members said they learned from the town attorney a month before the citizen board was created that state law doesn’t explicitly allow them to delegate this authority to a citizen group. They said this could be done either through a change in Bennington’s town charter or an amendment in the relevant state law.
Change in state law
On Tuesday, Selectboard Chair Jeannie Jenkins said the town will work with Bennington’s state legislators for a change in state law that would authorize the Community Police Advisory Review Board to take over the complaint reviews.
“We are somewhat relying on our delegation,” Jenkins said in an interview. “Late summer, early fall is when I usually see some sort of legislative action towards writing new bills.”
Advocacy groups, such as the American Civil Liberties Union and the NAACP, are urging the municipal government to seek legislative change that would strengthen the advisory review board’s police oversight powers.
At minimum, they said in a recent letter to the selectboard, the citizen group should be able to review specific complaints of police misconduct and take appropriate action. They said this would also provide clarity statewide.
“The people of Bennington deserve a public safety system that respects and values the civil rights and well-being of all,” James Lyall, ACLU of Vermont’s director, told VTDigger. “We hope the selectboard follows through on its stated commitment and seeks the statutory changes necessary for a stronger police oversight system — just as we hope they pursue the many other reforms their own policing experts recommended over two years ago.”
The organizations said they were ready to assist the town selectboard and state lawmakers in presenting the need for a statutory change to the Legislature.
Jenkins said she welcomes this assistance.
“I would love for the ACLU and the NAACP to help with moving legislation forward,” she said, given that the groups are more familiar than town officials with working with the Legislature.
Composition of board
On the advisory review board’s membership, the ACLU of Vermont and the Rutland Area NAACP wrote to the selectboard last year that the citizen group should include the local NAACP, Black Bennington residents and other groups most impacted by local policing activities. They also suggested including people who are homeless and those with low incomes.
Mia Schultz, president of the Rutland Area NAACP, said the advisory review board’s first seven members make up “only a small subset of people who are impacted by police mistreatment.”
Schultz said the two organizations had foreseen such an outcome, because the process the town had set up in creating the board had excluded such community members and others who were disproportionately disadvantaged. She said town officials had ignored the advocacy groups’ advice.
“There were too many barriers to include the most vulnerable with a true perspective of police mistreatment,” she said, citing as an example “the undue burden of requiring criminal justice training.”
When asked about diversity and a range of experiences within the advisory review board’s current membership, Jenkins said the selectboard considered those factors in its selection.
“We felt like we had a really good cross-section of the community,” she said. “The reason we have terms is so that, hopefully over time, we will be able to expand the viewpoints to viewpoints that aren’t on the board now.”
Jenkins said she was leaving it up to the members of the citizen group to discuss the subsections of society they represented. VTDigger couldn’t reach all the group members as of Wednesday evening.
The seven members were chosen during private selectboard meetings from a pool of applicants. Jenkins declined to say how many people altogether applied to be on the advisory review board.
The citizen board is scheduled to undergo a series of training sessions, starting in July, before holding its first meeting in October.
The advisory review board is part of ongoing efforts to reform the Bennington Police Department. Those efforts started after the agency was criticized for not properly handling the harassment of then-state Rep. Kiah Morris, which happened around 2016.
The Bennington town government 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.
Among the association’s findings — which were released the following year — was that the law enforcement agency portrayed a “warrior mentality,” which created mistrust within some segments of the community.
The association made several recommendations, including that Bennington consider establishing a civilian oversight board with representation from diverse populations.