For the last nine months, away from the spotlight, the town of Richmond has been reckoning with its police.
It began over the summer, as reverberations from a nationwide uprising against police violence reached even Vermont’s smallest towns. In Richmond, a town of 4,000 just east of Burlington, residents formed a decentralized group called Richmond Racial Equity, to focus on anti-racist policy.
That was work “new to the community,” says Ann Naumann, a member of the group and a longtime Richmond resident.
Recently, Richmond Racial Equity posted its first major victory. On Tuesday night, the town selectboard passed a new “fair and impartial policing policy,” following in the footsteps of larger communities such as Burlington and Winooski, to prohibit local police from collaborating with federal immigration authorities, or inquiring into individuals’ immigration status.
The policy, which Richmond’s police chief has said he will adopt, will make the town akin to a sanctuary city.
Richmond Racial Equity worked closely on the policy with Migrant Justice, a farmworker-led group that advocates for the rights of Vermont’s migrant workers. The efforts formed part of Migrant Justice’s “no más polimigra” campaign, which aims to end collaboration between police and federal immigration agents. “Polimigra” merges the Spanish words for police and immigration agents.
The movement has been gaining momentum statewide. Local groups in towns like Shelburne and Thetford have begun pushing for the policy.
In October, the Addison County sheriff quietly adopted the new policy for his department, after urging from Chittenden County state’s attorney Sarah George.
Calls echo, too, for other changes in small-town policing — where oversight often looks quite different than in Vermont’s larger municipalities. In some places, like Richmond, it’s a new fight. But so far, organizers say, it has shown the impact of small-scale activism.
“Small towns sometimes have the ability to go a little further with what people want. Or can take a little bit of risk,” said Christine Werneke, a Richmond Selectboard member. That, she said, is what happened in Richmond this week. And she expects more to come.
‘We want to feel more free’
All Vermont police departments are required to have a “fair and impartial policing” policy that outlines standards around biased policing and information-sharing with federal authorities. The blanket state policy is set by the Vermont Criminal Justice Training Council.
In 2017, that policy was revised, opening new loopholes around immigration enforcement that migrant workers said put them at greater risk of deportation. At the time, the law enforcement panel that drafted the new policy cited the concern that explicit restrictions on collaboration with federal agencies could risk penalties or legal challenges from the federal government.
Since then, organizers with Migrant Justice have looked to the local level for change.
“We’ve been going town by town,” said Rossy Alfaro, a leader with the organization and a Vermont dairy worker; she spoke through an interpreter. This sort of campaign is difficult, she said, but came “out of necessity.” “We want to feel more free. More safe.”
Alfaro and other workers with Migrant Justice envision, in lieu of a stronger statewide policy, a patchwork approach to limiting the power of federal immigration authorities in Vermont, with local police departments renouncing immigration enforcement one by one.
The language Migrant Justice has helped push through includes strong restrictions absent from state policing policies: barring local agencies from arresting individuals based on an immigration detainer, for instance.
When nationwide protests brought new scrutiny to policing, this localized method gained traction.
Who sets the policy?
Naumann, the Richmond activist, had floated the fair and impartial policing reforms in Richmond before. In 2018, she and a few others brought the issue up to the police chief at the time, who was “pretty lukewarm” about the idea, she said.
They decided to wait it out — to see what came of Burlington’s campaign, which was still ongoing.
Burlington passed its own strengthened fair and impartial policing policy in March 2020. But not until that summer did Richmond’s campaign begin in earnest, with the backing of Richmond Racial Equity and the attention of a town reeling from the death of George Floyd.
In its first weeks, the group faced some pushback. While Naumann says that, on the whole, the close-knit community was encouraging of their work, the Black Lives Matter flag that the town raised brought in some angry calls. Some Black Lives Matter signs were stolen.
“It’s not unheard of in little towns,” she said. “There are pockets of racism everywhere.”
Richmond Racial Equity’s work to pass the new fair and impartial policing policy — unlike the incidents over the summer — did not stir up much controversy among the public, Naumann said, though there was enough interest in the reforms to draw a virtual crowd of over 100 to a recent selectboard meeting.
The policy did, however, raise legal questions.
“We had hoped that what would happen would be that the selectboard would decide to set the policy for the town,” she explained. “And it became apparent that they didn’t believe they had that authority.”
As Richmond’s selectboard began to explore reforms, their town attorney informed them that it was the police chief, not the town, that could set department policy, based on the attorney’s interpretation of the law.
That position is supported by the Vermont League of Cities and Towns, a nonprofit that represents and consults with local officials.The group declined comment on its recommendations, other than to say that “we are required, as attorneys, to give our best opinion based on our reading of the statute and case law.”
Separation of powers
Others disagree. “The ultimate source of municipal police authority comes from the selectboard,” wrote Kira Kelley of the Vermont National Lawyers Guild and Lisa Ernst, an attorney with the Vermont ACLU, in a joint letter to the town. “Police chiefs cannot supersede state or municipal legislative authority when adopting department policy.”
If chiefs were in charge of policy, they wrote, that would be an “egregious” violation of the separation of powers doctrine.
A further concern — echoed in Winooski and Burlington as they deliberated on their policies — was that the policy would place the Richmond police in violation of federal law. That was not the case, Kelley and Ernst wrote: “No federal or Vermont law exists requiring local police to enforce federal immigration laws,” their letter reads, though in the past, the federal government has conditioned some grant money on compliance with immigration enforcement.
Ultimately, the town passed a resolution on the issue, strongly recommending — but not requiring — that the acting chief of police, Kyle Kapitanski, adopt the policy.
Kapitanski said he had some reservations about it: “I wrestled with it,” he told VTDigger. Still, he has chosen to adopt it. “We are here to serve the people of Richmond,” he said.
Activists worry that his word isn’t enough.
Kapitanski did not issue a formal statement saying he was implementing the policy, despite requests by the selectboard that he do so. He also did not agree to consult the selectboard before changing the policy in the future.
“This makes it very clear that we need to make sure that there is some mechanism for police accountability in Richmond,” Naumann said.
That’s the next item on Richmond Racial Equity’s agenda. A police oversight board for the town is in the “in the planning phases,” Werneke told VTDigger, with the tentative support of the selectboard.
For small towns like Richmond — who often lack the police commissions or oversight structures common in larger municipalities — these questions of authority often are hazy, and have long gone untested.
Yet such planning looks different in the town, which, as Werneke emphasized, lacks the resources of a larger municipality. In place of a multitude of departments, committees, and other layers of bureaucracy, police reforms in the town rest squarely on the shoulders of the town’s few staff members and, as Werneke said, “very engaged citizenry.”
Small towns push for oversight
This fall, Ella Chapman was working at a farm in the Upper Valley, where she would brainstorm with her coworkers about fair and impartial police reforms as the sun rose. “Just solving the world’s problems while picking vegetables,” she joked.
Chapman is a local organizer for the campaign to bar police collaboration with immigration authorities in the town of Thetford. While the work has slowed as the colder months have made outreach more difficult, she says the vision remains strong.
“I envision a world, and a small town, that can change, and be more open,” she said. “I hate the idea that workers are living in fear so close to me.”
Chapman said she is new to this work. But she said there is a benefit in pushing for change in a place like Thetford, a town of 2,600 where everyone knows everyone. “You have to see everybody at the dump every Saturday for recycling,” she said. She thinks it makes people more willing to engage in conversation.
Thetford, although small, has its own police department, which means Chapman and her team can petition their selectboard to help make changes, as Richmond did, or gather signatures to put the issue on the town meeting ballot.
But most of Vermont’s smallest towns don’t have their own police, and rely on the county sheriff or the state police. Just over 50 of Vermont’s 246 cities and towns have their own police departments.
That makes questions of police oversight more complicated.
In Windham County, another “no más polimigra” campaign has taken root. Organizers aim to pass the policy in the county’s largest town, Brattleboro — which is considering a litany of other changes to policing in the town — and also in the 11 towns covered by the Windham County sheriff, including Putney and Marlboro.
Unlike a town police department, sheriffs in Vermont’s 14 counties are typically not beholden to any municipal body, and are bound instead by state law.
“Sheriffs have full reign over their policies,” said Peter Newton, the Addison County sheriff. Though Newton is emphatic that his deputies work in service of the towns, those municipalities have no avenue for formal oversight of their policing.
So when Newton adopted a new fair and impartial policing policy in October 2020 — with near-identical language, he said, to that of Winooski — it was not publicized. He chose to adopt it, he said, after following the campaigns in Chittenden County and the advocacy of Migrant Justice.
Likewise, in Windham County, policy changes will be left up to the county sheriff, Mark Anderson.
Yet local advocates for police reforms are undeterred.
Ellen Schwartz, who is working on the Windham County fair and impartial policing campaign, says if Anderson declines to implement the policy, the group will petition Windham County towns to make it a condition of their contract with the sheriff. That tactic would likely hinge on whether a majority of the towns agreed.
As small towns begin to demand police oversight, however, some sheriffs have taken steps on their own. Last month, Anderson set up an advisory board to oversee his work as sheriff. In Addison County, Newtown says he, too, is in the process of setting up an oversight board.
Neither board will wield formal authority, falling short of activists’ demands for structural change. But in Windham County, Schwartz says the new body has provided an avenue for residents to raise their concerns. The board has spent its first month considering the new fair and impartial policing policy and looking at issues of bias in traffic stops, said Cliff Wood, a member of the group.
Wood, who lives in Putney, described new momentum for police oversight in small Southern Vermont towns — momentum that, as in Richmond, has not slowed as months go on.
“I’m pleased that, at the local level, this is being taken very seriously,” he said.
Read the story on VTDigger here: Richmond is among smaller Vermont towns taking new steps on police oversight.