What would it take for police to become a standup institution? Something not actively harmful? Well, probably something like the below bullet points. Yes, it’s a little bit “putting lipstick on a pig,” but short of firing all officers at once and starting new organizations around restorative justice, is there literally any slate of changes that could repurpose all these local institutions into forces for decency? Maybe something like this.

Maybe it won’t work. If it doesn’t, it’s because the staff of current departments has been self-selected to include people who will never do the work of humanity. People with race- and class-based discrimination and neoliberal ideology baked in by years, decades, of propaganda. Actually, this seems likely. But if anyone might want to give them the benefit of the doubt for a year and see how it goes, you’d need something like this.

And *then* if they keep up their shenanigans (what a euphemism for 1,300 murders in 2025!), then we fire them all, start anew, and don’t let any of them join whatever organization replaces it.

I started crafting this proposal when I was a journalist covering police in Chicago. I refined it when I was in DC and a part of a group of half a dozen accountability nerds tasked by the head of DC police to propose a slate of reforms. (Those reforms were ultimately not adopted; not even proposed publicly. The coward.)

Last but not least, don’t call what’s below a slate of “reforms.” Because this institution cannot be reformed. It must be re-imagined from the ground up. That’s what this tries to do. And it needs teeth. If a chief, or any other staff, management or otherwise, doesn’t want to do it, they must be sacked. The only way to change 1,300 murders a year is to take hold of the power of government, and use it.

• Town ordinance prohibiting any officer to lie about certain important things while they’re on duty, or acting in their official capacity. To be clear; the question of whether our officers ever have lied in these ways has no bearing here and is irrelevant; the only question that matters is whether the town allows them to do so in the future. No federal law, or to my knowledge Vermont state law, prohibits police from lying in the following ways, nor can their cases be dismissed because of it: They can lie about their ability to get a search warrant; can lie and say you will get a lighter sentence if you confess; can lie and claim that your fingerprints or DNA were on the evidence; can lie to you about an accomplice confessing; can lie about being an officer; can lie and say a conversation is off the record when it isn’t; can lie and say that a victim identified you in a photo; and can lie about whether they’ve lied to you previously. So let’s codify into ordinance the respectability, the increased trust from the community, that would come from prohibiting untruthfulness in these important ways.
• Keep a complete and rigorous record of all times “tactical” equipment or gear, weapons, or personnel are deployed. These deployments are sometimes or previously referred to as “SWAT,” but are not necessarily just that. Lists of gear or maneuvers (like “jump-outs”) that would trigger this more thorough reporting are to be evaluated by the Selectboard. The “rigorous record” is to include all details of each incident requiring deployment and, especially, how the chief determined this was necessary. These reports are to be made available to the public upon request within 24 hours of the incident’s conclusion, and monthly digests of the reports are to be published on the town website.
• Make and publish a similar monthly digest of arrests of all people without a permanent address at the time of arrest. At the end of this digest, report it as a percentage of all arrests that month. (Some forces’ arrests of those without houses surpass 50%.) In the publication, juxtapose this with the percentage of Hartford residents without a place to live, using the latest-available data by Upper Valley Haven.
• Similarly make and publish a monthly digest of all drug-related arrests, and their percentage of all arrests that month.
• Establish a new elected position: Citizen Police Reviewer. Candidates for this role are to have never worked as a police officer or a prosecutor, or for either of those institutions. It doesn’t matter whether our police have ever done anything listed in this document, or whether they ever will. The question of *whether we allow them to* at any point in the future, however far, is an entirely separate one. This requires an independent body with full access to police records and ability to interview officers, for official statements, at will.
• One of the Reviewer’s roles would concern perjury. If a defense attorney or an accused party, in a court case involving a Hartford officer, reports possible perjury to this Reviewer, then they investigate the claim and refer it to local prosecutors. Since prosecutors are known to refuse prosecution of police perjury, establish a “three strikes” rule at the town level: three documented cases of perjury more likely than not, and an officer is automatically fired from the force.
• The Citizen Police Reviewer is also charged with investigating any charges of “assault on a police officer.” (Too often this has been used as a dubious charge.) As an elected position, the Citizen Police Reviewer reports to the citizens, and is able to address the Selectboard at any of the board’s meetings with findings or concerns.
• Strictly maintain records of who is pulled over and their race *as recorded on their drivers license,* not as perceived by the officer. Provide annual reports to the public on percentage of stops by race.
• Ban from prosecution the so-called “inevitable discovery” doctrine, where illegally obtained evidence can become admissible
• End (or prohibit) so-called “pretextural” traffic stops, which is to say, stops not involving an imminent and serious threat to safety.
• Disavow and refuse to enforce any crack-down on abortion or women’s health that the federal government or state may try. Elsewhere, police dogs are being used to find abortion pills in the mail.
• Codify the public’s express right to record, with audio, visual, or any combination thereof, of any officer at any time they are on duty. If a state law already provides for this, make it a town ordinance anyway, to help engender further trust in police and to go into effect if the state ever repeals this law.
• A common strategy for police and prosecutors is levying charges against people that they know won’t stick—know they don’t have the basis for—so they get people to take plea deals for lesser charges. There should be penalties for this practice. While we don’t have authority to direct the Windsor State’s Attorney’s Office, we have authority over our police. Each officer should have, posted on the town website and updated monthly, a “percentage of charges, for which they were a party, that resulted in:
  • A conviction on that charge
  • A plea deal
  • A conviction on a lesser charge

And an automatic trigger for a publicly-accessible review by an independent authority, such as the top attorney with the town, if an officer obtains a certain low percentage. (That is, starting now. Previous records of this would have their slates wiped clean.) And if an officer retains that low percentage, these publicly-accessible reviews would happen quarterly.

• Create a policy and practice to not perform so-called “low-level” traffic stops that do not impact road safety, such as a broken taillight. This article cites sources showing they rarely lead to information actionable otherwise, and they create unnecessary danger for the public and officers. The article also describes positive results of similar efforts in many other jurisdictions.
• Heavily regulate “civil asset forfeiture.” Practices based on laws allowing this have gotten out of hand: have been shown to be discriminatory, have shown to create far more personal headaches and mistrust in the police (and thus local government) than they help, for example, thwart drug trafficking operations. At very least, we should reverse the burden of proof, requiring the state to justify seizure of an asset to a high bar rather than requiring the former owner to justify why an asset was legitimate or should be returned. Also, every seized asset should be described in depth, photographed, and posted publicly on the town’s website within 24 hours of the seizure.
• Permanently bar quotas on traffic stops, tickets written, and arrests. (Whether they are happening now or not is mostly irrelevant; the goal is to prevent them into the future.) This also leads into a discussion of wider incentives for job performance of officers. The full list of incentives (including, more simply, codified metrics of job performance) needs made public; evaluated by the Citizen Police Reviewer; and if necessary, reformed using targets like “diversions” or broader notions of community well-being.
• Attempt to rectify police departments’ traditionally unequal enforcement. Using best-available statistics as to what types of crime happen in every place in America, the department should devote resources in ways proportionate to those statistics. Wage theft, environmental crime, and other white-collar crime would see large upticks in resources devoted to them—likely also violence against women by people they know—while other types of crime would necessarily see fewer resources devoted. Twice annually the police chief should report to the selectboard what statistics they are using for this resource-allocation and why, and how they allocated town resources accordingly.
• Part of re-allocating enforcement would be to eliminate targeting the poorest people in our society for things like debt collection, driving on suspended licenses due to debts, drug possession, and trespassing. There is precedent for not enforcing state and/or federal laws against drug possession; the larger bodies seem not to try to force municipalities to do this.
• Speaking of trespassing, this should bar police from enforcing any anti-unhoused-person laws on the books, and prevent Hartford from passing such laws into the future. This would be laws against sleeping in public places or on public land, or laws against feeding people in public.
• Prevent Hartford police from targeting for “law enforcement” people seeking reproductive health care, and their care providers. Hartford police should also be prevented from assisting any state or federal agency for doing the same.
• Police have received training for trauma-informed responses, and how to engage in mental health related calls. There have also been efforts to send social workers and other non-police workers to these types of calls. This should be codified into standard policy to the extent it is not currently. The team of professionally-trained social workers should be fully funded to be on-call to deal with these requests. But if no social worker is available at a given time, and thus an officer needs dispatched to a call that normally would be handled by a social worker, that officer should not approach the scene with a police belt on their person, nor with a badge displayed. The first thing they should say, unless an emergency situation calls for it, is that while they are a police officer, the department would have preferred a social worker and is working to get one on scene, so they will have to do for the moment. These officers should leave their sidearms in their vehicles, not just keep it concealed.
• All training material for officers is to be made fully available to the public. Any test given to would-be recruits to the force is to be made fully available to the public, as well as all hired recruits’ scores on those tests.
• Establish an anonymous system (using end-to-end encrypted means such as Signal or Securedrop) of reporting potential misconduct by colleagues on the force, or other stakeholders working with Hartford officers. Any entries to this system are to be investigated by the Citizen Police Reviewer, and the entry itself and any materials from the investigation are to be reviewed by the Town Manager in cooperation with the top attorney at the town. The Town Manager then presents their findings to the Selectboard, as a personnel matter within Executive Session.
• Hartford police currently don’t carry tasers. This will be the official word to ban them, due to what they can do to hearts (kill humans). Also, Linda Tirado was shot in the eye with ‘nonlethal ammunition’ while working as a journalist during the Floyd protests. The resulting traumatic brain injury to her left frontal lobe has caused her body to forget how to operate her organs. That’s why this also bans so-called ‘rubber bullets.’
• After any so-called “officer-involved” harm to a citizen, the officer involved must be interviewed about the incident immediately without delay, and without any corroborating with other officers, and the interview must be recorded for transcription.
• Any “officer-involved” harm to a citizen is to be presented to the Selectboard at the next regularly-scheduled board meeting, and the incident described to the board and the public. If any charge is filed against citizen(s) in the incident, said charge(s) and their basis are to be explained to the board and public. If any citizen is killed or suffers major incapacitation, any member of the Selectboard may call for a vote of the full Selectboard on whether to recommend the involved officer to the county State’s Attorney for a prosecution case.
• All unholstering and pointing of sidearms, and all discharges of sidearms, should be recorded and reported to the Selectboard at least monthly, including the full reports of each of these incidents to appear in the Selectboard packet.
• Town ordinance should bar any officer from shooting at anyone as they try to get away, that is, toward the rear of someone’s person. Anyone killed in this manner triggers an automatic recommendation from the Selectboard to the State’s Attorney for prosecution.
• Anyone harmed by an officer shall receive aid rendered by any officer on scene. If the only officer on scene is the one who did the harm, that officer is still required to render aid. All officers should carry two rubber gloves and a sharp-proof glove on their person in the event aid is needed to be rendered. If EMTs have not been called, an officer on scene is required to call for them during the first moments of aid.
• Any discharge of a weapon—firearm, taser, or otherwise—while an officer is on duty is to be well-documented and summaries of those incidents reported to the Selectboard at least monthly.
• Hartford police are to never possess a machine, such as a “drone” or its ilk, with a weapon attached.
• Neither the town of Hartford, nor its police department, may accept grants of equipment normally used primarily for or by a military; nor may it purchase equipment normally used primarily for or by a military. (Human “body armor,” or an unarmed robot for bomb detonation/diffusion, are commonly used by police outside of any grants of military equipment they may receive, so are examples of items not covered by this prohibition.)
• Speaking of gifts of equipment or funding, the Hartford police department may accept funding from the Biden administration during its push for extra police funding (the “100,000 more police bill”) only to cover existing PD expenses offsetting what the town otherwise, or normally, spends on police–not to expand the department’s operations.
• Speaking of a slow creep toward military tactics, Hartford police are to be prohibited from training with any military or intelligence operation, including from any foreign military or intelligence operation, such as from Israel. All material from police training, aside from sensitive investigative tactics, is to be made public on the Hartford PD website.
• To the extent Hartford police ever base any enforcement decisions, or indeed any police operations, on a computer-based algorithm, that algorithm is to be made publicly accessible in its entirety. No “black boxes” are to be in its code, including any proprietary code. If a company is ever contracted to assist with code of police systems other than basic systems such as data entry or records retention, then that code must be 1. Fully public, as stated above, and 2. Independently audited by an expert on policing code or algorithms from Electronic Frontier Foundation, The Markup, or the ACLU.
• To the extent Hartford has or ever does have a database of “gang members” or other groups it wishes to monitor, the groups in question and the policies surrounding the force’s interaction with those groups are to be reviewed by the Citizen Police Reviewer, the Town Manager, and the top attorney at the town. Too often, people who are members of one gang during a turbulent time in their life (gang membership is now more fluid than it once was) are barred from associating with swaths of society that otherwise would become a healthy community for them. The reviewing panel here should expressly seek to prevent this scenario, as well as violations of the first amendment freedom of association.
• If Hartford has or ever will have dashboard cameras or “body cams,” the video from these, immediately upon recording, is the property of all citizens, and is to be made accessible, at most, within 24 hours of a given incident. This video, and any associated audio, is not to be edited in any way, at strict penalty of perjury. The department is to establish regular checks for audio functionality, at least 15% of units inspected weekly, at random. The recording units should be physically unable to be turned off while an officer is on duty.
• The budget of the police department should be frozen as it stands, except perhaps a 3% per year inflation adjustment (if nationwide inflation is 3% or more, and to match inflation if it is less). Officer attrition should not cause the hiring of replacement officers, unless the department reaches the point of 70% of its current staffing. Funds saved by officer attrition, down to 70% of current force personnel, should be swept back to the town and specifically directed to evidence-based solutions to violence. Despair begets violence. Police should welcome helping ensure more of Hartford’s residents have access to cognitive-behavioral therapy for young people; the availability of jobs for young people; school breakfasts and summer meals for kids; and even free clothes-washing for those who need it.
• Codify the right of citizens to protest. Codify that police have a duty to protect protesters, and that police are barred from corralling, or “kettle-ing,” protesters. Codify that police are not allowed to surveil protesters in any way, shape, or form. (See draft of larger protest policy, submitted to Town Manager on 5-20-24.)
• Bar Hartford police from using any “man-in-the-middle” (MITM) forms of surveillance, intercepting communications or other data and passing it along without the knowledge of the person whose data is being intercepted. This prevents the use of things like “Stingray” and “Hailstorm” units or any other MITM procedure, regardless of where the technology behind these attacks comes from or who owns that technology. Bar Hartford police from participating in any of these collections, or attacks, if carried out by any other private or government entity. Bar Hartford police from using any data collected via a MITM attack from any other private or government entity.
• Bar Hartford police from unlocking, opening, turning on, or copying (with or without opening), a phone or other electronic device in the possession of someone who is arrested, suspected, or in police custody, unless police possess a judge’s warrant for doing so. Make all warrants that Hartford police obtain, or use, for the purpose of unlocking or copying an electronic device, immediately available on the town’s website.
• While in custody, every person is offered an N95 mask to wear (or KN95 should they choose that), should they choose to wear it. That person should be offered a new N95 mask each day, and those masks saved such that they are offered 7 masks per week, and are given the chance to rotate their masks daily. Any person in custody who says they are experiencing symptoms of infection, or are displaying the same, should be required to wear one of these masks. All indoor areas where persons are kept in custody for more than 15 minutes should be served by an air filtration system with HEPA capability.
• Bar Hartford police from tracking the location of any citizen, suspected or not, via an electronic device of theirs, unless police possess a judge’s warrant for doing so. Make all warrants that Hartford police obtain, or use, for the purpose of unlocking or copying an electronic device, immediately available on the town’s website.
• Bar Hartford police from tracking the location of any citizen, suspected or not, via automatic license plate readers of any kind, owned by any entity, unless police possess a judge’s warrant for doing so. (This includes using data from automatic license plate readers owned by any other entity.) Make all warrants that Hartford police obtain, or use, for the purpose of unlocking or copying an electronic device, immediately available on the town’s website.
• All items referenced in this document that are to be made available on the town’s website are to be easily accessible to the public via a prominent link from the police’s web page.
• Many states have a fund to pay for people’s medical bills following a violent crime. If Vermont does not, Hartford should. And it shouldn’t have caveats. All people who are victims of violent crime, regardless of their community affiliations, deserve treatment. Compensation for victims of police violence are to have their own system overseen by the Citizen Police Reviewer, which should be so substantial (As in, significantly more robust than standard victim compensation) as to largely eliminate the need for a citizen abused by an officer to file civil suit.
• Into the future, ensure that any “bad apples” don’t “spoil the whole barrel.” Any officer who has more than a certain, relatively low, number of citizen complaints per year face a review by a citizen-led review commission, where the head of the commission is an elected position. Ensure that filing a citizen complaint against an officer is not an onerous process.
• To ensure upstanding members of the department, any domestic violence complaint against an officer shall result in an immediate suspension without pay and an investigation of the incident by the Citizen Police Reviewer. The Citizen Police Reviewer has the ability, at the conclusion of its investigation, to dismiss any officer based on results of the investigation. Any officer who gets a domestic violence conviction, including any presently on the force with DV convictions newer than 10 years, is automatically dismissed.

IMPLEMENT AN INTER-DEPARTMENT SEARCH, AT THE DIRECTION OF THE TOWN MANAGER, AS A MATTER OF INTERNAL REVIEW: Without announcing this to any officer or staff beyond the Police Chief and IT personnel, both sworn to secrecy, at the direction of the Town Manager, IT personnel will perform searches on the histories of all communications methods owned by or in the control of the Police Department. These searches will be for a list of white supremacist terminology, crafted such that false positive results would be rare. (That is, terms so specific that if any result is obtained, there is a high likelihood of a department staff member’s involvement with a white supremacist group.) With any result, the Town Manager and top attorney at the town would debate the best course of action.