DEFUND THE POLICE (profanity alert):

Vergennes is also not alone in attempting, as a city or town, to contemplate civilian oversight of the police as one practical response to Floyd's death. Similar oversight has also been proposed in municipalities including Phoenix, Arizona; East Lansing, Michigan; Columbus, Ohio; and Somerville, Massachusetts.

Before the explosive council meeting of July 16 and the subsequent collapse of city government in Vergennes, Fritz and many residents had made clear their feelings that the police department, whose funding has increased by 156 percent in the last six years, needed to change. 

The foundation of their call was the 2017 report, Driving While Black and Brown in Vermont, which found marked racial disparities in how Black and Hispanic drivers were treated by police in the state.

Professors Stephanie Seguino (University of Vermont) and Nancy Brooks (Cornell University) conceived the study after the passing of a 2014 bill requiring all Vermont law enforcement agencies to collect traffic stop data in order to make it possible to identify and track any racial disparities in policing. Driving While Black and Brown in Vermont uses the first round of data that became available in 2016. 

The study found that at the state level, Black and Hispanic drivers were more likely to receive a citation once stopped than white or Asian drivers. The Black arrest rate was almost double the white arrest rate. Black drivers were four times more likely to be searched, subsequent to a stop, than white drivers. Hispanic drivers were almost three times more likely to be searched.

The authors wrote, "At the extreme is Vergennes, where Black drivers are stopped at a rate that is almost 3 times their estimated share of the county population, followed by Bennington, where the Black share of stops is almost 2.5 times greater than their share of the county population."

At a Vergennes police forum held in June that was open to the public, Chief Merkel said the statistics were "flawed," and claimed "transient" drivers using Route 22A which goes through the city had skewed the statistics.

In a follow-up report, published in 2018, the authors responded to the criticism. The 2017 data was not "systematically flawed," the authors claimed, as they re-analyzed their data according to the methodological querying of the cops. "The use of more rigorous statistical techniques therefore does not alter the nature of our 2017 findings."

The authors concluded: "These disparities should be of great concern to law enforcement agencies, communities, and legislators. While the disparities in no way suggest that agencies are intentionally profiling people of color, they do indicate the necessity for law enforcement to be self-reflective about their policing practices and to interrogate the role of implicit bias in decision-making."

At the June police forum, Merkel insisted, "We don't issue tickets by virtue of race or anything else. If you're speeding through town, you get stopped. Nine times out of ten we can't see who's driving the car until they're upon us."

Merkel said he felt "comfortable" with Vergennes' police officers "because I know them. That doesn't mean I accept it blindly and don't look into things. I do. I hold my guys accountable." He was "at a loss" to address how the department could cost less.

He said there were no people of color employed in the police department, and only one woman. "I take the best candidate," Merkel told the meeting. "Gender or race are not specific to me."

"Driving While Black and Brown in Vermont was a shocker to us," State Representative Lanpher told The Daily Beast.

"We looked at a mirror through the data and were not happy with what we saw. My response was to say, 'This is appalling, let's dig into the data.' What happened was the opposite: There was a retrenching by the police, and a defensiveness, which didn't help the situation at all, a response of 'We don't believe the data.'"

In 2019, there was a proposal to cut the city's police budget by a sum roughly equivalent to two police officers. Former mayor Fritz told The Daily Beast it had "decent support" among the city council but at the discussion Merkel and his officers had stood in the room, dressed in their uniforms.

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