BRATTLEBORO — At a public hearing with the potential for division and discord, a new Community Safety Review Committee — sparked by Black Lives Matter protests and calls for police defunding — listened Monday as a diverse audience voiced similar concerns about the security of minority populations.
“We do live in fear because we are not able to communicate with everybody,” said Rebecca Lalanne, head of Deaf Vermonters Advocacy Services. “We’re struggling to figure out how the community can make itself accessible for deaf people.”
“As a parent of a child with a disability,” continued Crista Yagjian, a mother of a student with Down syndrome, “I worry about how his behavior will be perceived.”
“I’ve come to know that while I will be profiled,” added Gillian Love, an area Latina, “I will always have white people telling me that my experiences aren’t real because they aren’t real to them. We have to do better for every single person who has spoken up and for those who haven’t been here to.”
A nine-member citizens committee appointed by the local Selectboard is reviewing the use of municipal government resources “to ensure equitable and optimal community health, wellness and safety.”
Although the $40,000 study was prompted by this year’s Minneapolis police killing of Black Minnesotan George Floyd, it isn’t limited to law enforcement but also includes other Brattleboro crisis responders, related care workers and the nearly 12,000 residents they’re supposed to help.
While several of the 50 people who attended Monday’s online public hearing complained of racial profiling, many pointed to other problems involving diversity.
Kaz DeWolfe spoke of being a young “psychiatric survivor” who is transgender.
“When in crisis, I made use of support hotlines, and when those folks determined that I needed emergency intervention, not once has there been a support worker, crisis worker, social worker — each time the people who showed up at my door were police who are really not at all trained or equipped.”
DeWolfe noted the town is home to the state’s largest psychiatric hospital, the Brattleboro Retreat. But even specialized services there can spur questions.
“Something that a lot of us really have needed is some intensive support,” DeWolfe said, “and it is terrible that the only space to do that is a locked unit that requires being strip-searched upon entry.”
Gary Stroud, a member of the town’s Citizen Police Communications Committee, said his multiracial child faced name-calling at school.
“It’s not just we as adults who experience that,” Stroud said. “No matter where you go anywhere in the state or this country or the world, you’re still going to have racism, and it’s not just with the police, it’s on the job, it’s in the schools, it’s in the hospitals, it’s everywhere. This is something we need to deal with on so many different levels.”
The committee — which includes representatives of color, from the LGBTQ community, of lower income and with addiction or psychiatric challenges — is set to hold a second public hearing Saturday from 5 to 8 p.m., with more information available at the town’s website and related Facebook page.
The committee then will develop a set of recommendations by Dec. 31 for consideration by the Selectboard as it drafts a municipal budget for the next fiscal year.
A few of the solutions proposed Monday were global.
“We can improve our police department,” resident Tara O’Brien said, “but ultimately it is a systemic problem.”
Most, however, were local.
“I hope this committee looks at alternatives to when police are dispatched to calls,” O’Brien continued, “because it has such an impact.”
Social justice advocate Shela Linton offered a long list of challenges about growing up as a person of color in the nation’s second whitest state. But she also recalled how local police aided her when she was locked out of her car and, later, she found someone overdosing on drugs.
“I want to see more of us helping each other out, more of that mutual aid, more of us saving each other’s lives,” Linton said.
For his part, Stroud called for more conversations with police and other public safety workers.
“At some point we’re going to have to say, ‘You’re here just like us, you’re human, just like us.’ As changes are coming down the pipeline, we can be a part of it or a victim of it. I choose to be a part of it and not a victim anymore.”
Read the story on VTDigger here: Brattleboro minority populations voice concerns about public safety.