BENNINGTON — A petition calling for the resignation of the police chief and town manager is gaining traction following the attention it received at weekend protests around the state.
Organizers from Rights & Democracy, the statewide advocacy group that drew up the petition, say Chief Paul Doucette and Town Manager Stuart Hurd have perpetuated a culture that tolerates racial discrimination.
Doucette has worked for the police department for 30 years, while Hurd has worked for the town for 47 years.
“Take out your phones,” Tabitha Moore, president of the Rutland Area NAACP, told a crowd of 500 protesters in Rutland on Sunday. She instructed them to text “Justice” to a phone number, which would bring them to RAD’s petition.
“It’s time for the Bennington Police Department to change their ways,” she said into the megaphone. “There’s no reason our lone black woman legislator had to step down, except that she was not protected by those who were supposed to protect her.”
Moore was referring to Kiah Morris, a former Vermont state representative who declined to run for a third two-year term in August 2018, partially because of racial harassment. Morris’s case received national attention, with a headline in the New York Times and a mini-documentary on HuffPost.
Last week, Shawn Pratt, the husband of petition organizer Mia Schultz, rallied a crowd at a Black Lives Matter protest in Bennington. Standing on a table outside the Avocado Pit, located across the street from the Bennington Police Department, Pratt called for protesters to sign RAD’s petition.
“We want Stu Hurd out, we want Officer Doucette out,” he called to the crowd, which cheered in response. A video of his speech, posted to Facebook, has since seen more than seven 7,000 views.
Schultz, an RAD board member, declined to provide the exact number of signatures the petition has received, but said the number was approaching 1,000 on Monday.
Despite the call for resignations, the select board, including chairman Donald Campbell, is steadfast in its opposition to ousting Hurd and Doucette. At Monday’s meeting, Campbell acknowledged the need for change within the department, but said he disagreed with RAD’s petition.
“Recently, some people have suggested that the removal of our town manager and chief of police are a prerequisite to local police reform,” he said. “I disagree. Although people often forget this, the town manager works for us. He is our employee, as is the chief of police. To my knowledge, no previous iteration of this board has ever told either man that they should change the way we do policing. I cannot, in good conscience, fire somebody for not following instructions they were never given.”
The petition, first posted to the RAD website May 11, asks for Campbell to recuse himself from the process of hiring a new town manager and police chief. It also calls for the town to create a citizens’ committee to oversee police.
In April, the International Association of Chiefs of Police, contracted by the select board, released a comprehensive report examining whether the department’s policies and procedures promote fair and bias-free policing.
The report found “no policies that would encourage systemic bias in the organization.” Instead, it cited a lack of policies that “would strengthen opportunities to support members of the community who are most at risk for disparate treatment.”
Suggested by the report are 25 recommendations targeted at improving the policing environment, creating and enhancing relationships with the community, and updating policies that have left room for bias and lack of transparency.
Hurd said he’s committed to implementing all 25 recommendations. He said the department has already updated several policies identified in the report, and has softened the department website, which the report said emphasized a “warrior appearance.”
Doucette did not respond to VTDigger’s request for comment.
Hurd said that he will not resign unless prompted by the select board. “I have served this community for 47 years, and I will continue to serve this community to the best of my ability,” he said.
“Are there opportunities for improvement?” he added. “Can we look more toward the community policing model? Certainly. We can do that. Both the chief and I, and this department, in fact, are looking forward to making some changes that should improve that aspect of policing.”
But after George Floyd’s death at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer catalyzed the global protests that call for systemic change in policing, Bennington residents have become increasingly divided about whether implementing the report’s recommendations will bring about a sufficient measure of change, or whether the necessary cultural shift will come only from a change in leadership.
Schultz and fellow petition organizer Mary Gerisch doubt Doucette and Hurd will be able to earn back the trust of marginalized community members, even if the department undergoes comprehensive training.
The IACP found a significant gap in trust between some members of the public and the department. In response to a community wide survey included in the report, 24.8% participants said they do not trust the Bennington police at all, and 13.3% said they trust the department “a little.”
When asked whether participants have been discriminated against by the department, 7.2% replied they had felt discrimination “to a great extent.”
“They set the tone,” Schultz said, referring to Doucette and Hurd. “They set the tone for everybody beneath them. And if they say there’s no racism, everybody’s going to believe there’s no racism in this department. Had I gotten an evaluation like they got, I wouldn’t have a job anymore.”
Hurd said he has heard that marginalized community members feel unprotected, but that those feelings do not originate from a culture perpetuated within the police department.
“From my perspective, that culture doesn’t exist,” he said. “It doesn’t matter how long I say it or how many times I say it. Those people who are calling for my resignation aren’t going to listen, anyway.”
He added that critics of the department focus closely on the report’s criticisms, but fail to acknowledge positive aspects of the department, including activities police officers host with kids, like the New Experience Camp and bicycle helmet rodeos where helmets are given out to kids who attend.
“There are a host of things that the police department participates in that are good for the community,” he said.
Organizers say gaps in policy, such as the absence of hate crime reporting protocol, have left community members unsafe following threatening behavior and harassment. The IACP report confirms that a portion of the community is reluctant to file complaints or request assistance from the department.
“This fear is predicated on the belief that if they do, they will eventually be retaliated against by the department,” the report reads.
Lynn Mazza, a Bennington resident, is part of a group that has written and filed an ordinance, which the select board is currently reviewing, that would create an oversight board that includes marginalized community members who would oversee the police department.
Mazza works as a peer advocate counselor at the Vermont Center for Independent Living, a disability rights and advocacy organization, and said she became involved with efforts to reform the police department after hearing from disabled community members who fear local police.
While encouraging those who have stories about police harassment to file formal complaints, Mazza says she often gets the same answer. Even when she suggests filing somewhere other than the police department — the Human Rights Commission or the NAACP, for example — they decline.
“I’ve had this happen so many times, I can’t even tell you,” she said. “Their sense is that this town is so small, even if we do it anonymously, the police will figure out who they are and that they’ve filed a complaint, and it’ll come back on them.”
Mazza says she was “flabbergasted” when she heard Doucette give what she called a “blue lives matter” speech at a bias policing community forum held in Bennington in 2016.
“Back then,” Doucette said at the forum, referring to the time he attended the Vermont Police Academy, “people respected the police for who they were and what they stood for. This has changed over time. It really has, especially with our younger generation. Today we see bias against law enforcement officers, law enforcement officer’s families — young children shy away from the police from time to time.”
Later in his speech, Doucette said diversity in Bennington has expanded during his tenure. “Bennington has become a far more diverse community than when I moved here in 1986,” he said. “We welcome people in our community, there’s no doubt about it. The only thing is, we want to make sure that when people move to our community, they’re not here for some illegal enterprise, or to conduct transactions that they shouldn’t be. And we will monitor that.”
Doucette’s speech caused Mazza to think he didn’t understand implicit bias as it relates to race.
“Since the time that Doucette made that speech,” Mazza said, “maybe he’s read a thousand books and talked to a bunch of people, and really kind of evolved his racial perspective. Even if that has happened — it comes back to a trust issue.”
Curtiss Reed, executive director of the Vermont Partnership for Fairness and Diversity, has been providing consultations with the select board. Reed has suggested a four-pronged approach to facilitate changes within the select board and police department, highlight transparency, “revamp” the police department’s mission with the help of the community, and put together a civilian review board.
A formal proposal by Reed will be presented to the board next Monday.
The select board initially contracted with IACP in response to a statement made by the American Civil Liberties Union and NAACP in February 2019 asking Attorney General TJ Donovan to investigate the department over the handling of evidence related to threats against Morris.
In December, James Lawton, Morris’s husband, filed a complaint against Doucette with the Vermont Criminal Justice Training Council alleging misconduct by the chief. The complaint accuses the chief and the department of mishandling evidence and failing to properly investigate complaints made by Lawton and Morris.
On Monday, Lawton notified the select board that the training council has hired an outside investigator to move forward with the complaint.
He included in his complaint a series of emails he obtained involving exchanges between Doucette and others. Lawton has said the communications back up claims that local officials did not take reports from the couple seriously and dragged their feet in investigating their cases.
Though Morris works on staff at Rights & Democracy as the movement and politics director, she and Lawton have separated themselves from the petition.
“This isn’t just about Kiah Morris,” Schultz said. “Every time we talk about the Bennington Police Department, we put her name in there. I think that she really wants to focus on the police department, and not on her, which is the proper focus.”
Alan Keays contributed reporting.
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