Tom Boswell is a lifelong community organizer, journalist, and award-winning poet.
BRATTLEBORO-On Feb. 19 of 2024, seven Windham County citizens published an opinion piece in VTDigger exhorting Vermont residents to “stand with immigrants and call on your legislators to urge the Criminal Justice Council to vote on the proposed policy without further delay!”
The policy they were concerned about was Vermont’s Fair and Impartial Policing Policy (FIPP), which defines the state’s minimal standards for law enforcement’s behavior surrounding issues of bias in policing.
And it was being tinkered with again.
The seven authors were part of a Migrant Justice ad hoc statewide campaign — No Más Polimigra — seeking to limit collaboration between Vermont law enforcement and federal immigration authorities.
Their essay noted that during Donald Trump’s (first) term as president, the 2016-model state policy was re-evaluated and the current policy reflected the rollback of safeguards for immigrants that were in the original policy.
They also mentioned that, a little over a week earlier, at a meeting of the Vermont Criminal Justice Council, when an undocumented farmworker spoke about his fear of leaving the farm because of law enforcement’s continued cooperation with federal immigration enforcement agents (la migra), a part-time police officer and deputy sheriff had uttered an obscenity on a hot mic. (The officer hastily resigned his position on the Criminal Justice Council and from his police duties.)
If this was not enough, the Criminal Justice Council delayed its vote on revisions to the FIPP in order to consider last-minute suggestions from the Vermont Association of Chiefs of Police.
But exactly three months later, Migrant Justice published a news release proclaiming “Victory! Vermont strengthens ‘No Polimigra’ protections.”
The policy had been strengthened once again.
* * *
The FIPP has traveled a twisted and tortured path in its relatively short history. It’s an issue that won’t go away, like a pesky mother-in-law or the neighbor’s barking dog.
On June 17, the town of Putney’s Equity and Inclusion Advisory Committee hosted a forum billed as “a community conversation about Vermont’s Fair and Impartial Policing Policy.” The panelists invited to speak were Windham County Sheriff Mark Anderson, State Police Sergeant Tyler Noyes, Dr. Cliff Wood, chair of the Windham County Sheriff’s Advisory Committee, and State Sen. Nader Hashim, a former state trooper, all individuals with some relationship to law enforcement.
There was no representation from organizations like Migrant Justice, which had played such a major role in the creation of the FIPP.
The panelists, for the most part, appeared to want to talk about almost anything but the policy. Ann Schroeder, a retired librarian, representative of the NAACP, resident of Dummerston, and one of the seven signers of the aforementioned op-ed, commented afterwords: “It was very disappointing. They didn’t talk about the FIPP at all; there was so much that wasn’t covered.”
* * *
The tumultuous events that transpired in South Burlington on March 11 may have been the motivation behind the Putney forum, and those events will probably continue to haunt Vermont law enforcement, legislators, and regular citizens for months to come.
What began as a thwarted attempt by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to apprehend a person in a vehicle around 7:30 a.m. escalated to the involvement of officers from three federal agencies and three Vermont law enforcement agencies: the Vermont State Police (VSP), Burlington Police, and the South Burlington Police.
ICE agents ultimately broke into a house on Dorset Street, aided by Vermont law enforcement, and they detained three people, soon released by the federal courts.
By 8:30 that morning, Migrant Justice had alerted its rapid response network that ICE was at the Dorset Street house, and within a few hours over 100 “protectors” had gathered there.
More ICE officers had arrived from New Hampshire, making about 20 on the scene, and the Burlington police were staging by the South Burlington City Hall. Around 5:25 p.m., according to testimony provided by Burlington Interim Police Chief Shawn Burke at a City Council meeting on March 23, an ICE Special Response Team, escorted by at least eight Vermont State Patrol vehicles, arrived at the house.
A Critical Action Team (state patrol) arrived in a black van, and these officers cleared the crowd so the ICE agents could bust down the door.
* * *
At a Joint House-Senate Judicial Committee hearing at the State House on March 31, which lasted over two hours, people were allotted two minutes each to testify about their experiences in South Burlington during the ICE raid.
Jess Shapiro of Burlington told lawmakers that she was choked and strangled by a Vermont state trooper, who also threatened to break her fingers, until she became unconscious and was dragged out of the crowd.
Sean O’Hearn of Ferrisburgh said he was assaulted five times, including once when he was choked so forcefully that he pulled a metal railing out of the concrete foundation on the Dorset Street porch. He had trouble testifying because his trachea was bruised.
O’Hearn said he couldn’t identify the officers who assaulted him because they wore masks and removed their identification.
“Our democracy is hanging on a thread,” he said as he finished his testimony.
Among the 60 or so people who spoke, many reported being shoved, hit, choked, thrown into the street and having clothes ripped off. Later on that day, ICE used flash-bang grenades and fired pepper spray and chemical agents into the crowd.
Cynthia Cook, from Burlington, a professional mediator and facilitator with degrees from Yale and the Vermont Law School, testified that the morning was peaceful and she thought the South Burlington Police did a good job.
“Everything changed when the State Police arrived,” she said.
“The community members who came out in support of our neighbors, and I imagine the residents who were being besieged, did not feel the least bit protected,” Cook said. “We felt threatened. We felt confronted.”
“If the only thing you have is a hammer,” she continued, “everything looks like a nail.”
The troops arrived “with a lot of hammers,” she said.
“They didn’t arrive with a single peacekeeping skill set,” Cook said. “They demonstrated a significant need for intensive training in peacekeeping and de-escalation.”
* * *
One of the tablE of legislators who listened to this testimony in Montpelier was Sen. Tanya Vyhovsky, who sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee. She was also probably the only state legislator who was there that day in South Burlington.
“Like many, I was pretty horrified by what happened on March 11,” she said when I talked to her recently. “I’ve been calling for the strengthening of the FIPP, and actually for signing it into law, for years. Violating a policy doesn’t come with the same implications as violating the law.
“As I saw it and as I read the FIPP, even as it stands now, it appeared quite clear to me that our state and local law [officers] had violated it. They had a joint command center, they cleared the way for them [ICE] to get in, they helped take people out of the building when only one person had a warrant,” Vyhovsky said.
“I think there are lots of points that our existing policy didn’t do what we hoped it would do,” she continued. “So I think it needs to be strengthened and codified into law, which then opens the door for different types of investigations.”
Vyhovsky thinks “it’s always problematic to ask anyone to be the arbiter of whether they broke the law. We ask our police to police themselves; we would never ask the public to do that.”
* * *
When Will Lambek, a Migrant Justice leader, testified at the hearing, he said: “Throughout the day on March 11, police collaborated with ICE in clear violation of Vermont’s Fair and Impartial Policing Policy. The policy explicitly prohibits police from “accepting requests by federal immigration authorities to support or assist in civil immigration enforcement” and from “facilitating the detention of individuals by federal immigration authorities for suspected civil immigration violations.”
When I talked with Lambek recently, he noted that each Vermont police agency had completed its after-action reports.
“Not surprising to me,” he said, “they all exonerated themselves. Police aren’t capable of policing themselves, so that’s why we need independent oversight power and an independent investigation into the police-ICE raid of March 11.”
The Legislature subsequently took action to empower the Vermont Human Rights Commission to conduct an investigation, “and we are hopeful that they will do so,” Lambek said.
“At the same time, we’re focused on not just accountability for the events of March 11 but on making sure these events don’t repeat themselves in the future,” he continued.
“Efforts to strengthen FIPP predate March 11,” Lambek added. “Our work now revolves around issues unrelated to March 11. The provisions in the FIPP that prohibit ICE and Border Patrol and other immigration enforcement activities have been in the policy, more or less, for a decade and they’re actually quite clear.”
Lambek stressed that the model Vermont Fair and Impartial Policing policy created by the Vermont Criminal Justice Council is “the floor but not the ceiling.” Migrant Justice has been encouraging communities around the state to adopt stronger, more protective measures than the minimal state standards.
* * *
Among the towns that have taken action and passed stronger local versions of the Fair and Impartial Policing Policy are Winooski, Burlington, Brattleboro, Hartford, and Norwich.
At their Annual Town Meetings in March 2022, three Windham County communities — Putney, Dummerston, and Marlboro — overwhelmingly passed non-binding resolutions to strengthen their respective FIpPs based on language proposed by No Más Polimigra.
Windham County Sheriff Anderson had written an open letter on Feb. 1 saying that the department was open to the discussion and evaluation of the policy and had engaged in discourse with the Windham County Sheriff’s Advisory Committee, selectboards, town managers, lawmakers, the state attorney general, No Más Polimigra, the ACLU, Migrant Justice, and various other organizations.
The sheriff listed some concerns with the proposed changes, including that some of the language could violate state or federal law and that less than 10% of agencies in Vermont had adopted the proposed language, “creating a patchwork of expectations across the state.”
Sheriff Anderson used data from a report on trends in racial disparities in Vermont traffic stops (2014-2019) to bolster his case. The disparity index (DI) used a measure where anything over 1 indicated a greater likelihood of a reported population to be stopped.
Among towns that had adopted the No Más Polimigra language, Brattleboro had a 1.6 DI, Burlington had 1.74 DI, South Burlington had 2.07 DI and Winooski 3.3 DI. The Windham County Sheriff’s Office scored a mere 0.28 DI.
In his letter, Anderson indicated that for the last eight years his department had not been involved in any civil immigration enforcement, not shared information or contacted federal immigration authorities regarding any investigation, not found any indication of explicit or implicit bias enforcement in traffic stop and race data reports, and not conducted any border enforcement or provided federal immigration officials access to people in the department’s custody. He noted that minority populations were stopped so infrequently that his agency’s activity fell below the threshold for statistical significance.
* * *
Of course, the immigrant and refugee population in southern Vermont has probably increased considerably since Anderson penned his open letter in 2022.
I met with Joe Wiah, the director of the Ethiopian Community Development Council’s new refugee resettlement site in Brattleboro, which opened its doors in early fall of 2021. Wiah is a refugee himself, having fled war in his former home of Liberia. He eventually found his way to Vermont and Brattleboro, where he first worked as a housing case manager in Windham County.
Since he started with ECDC, the program has settled 526 refugees in southern Vermont: 379 in Brattleboro and Guilford, 121 in Bennington, and most of the rest in Springfield. The new refugees come from Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, El Salvador, Venezuela, Eritrea, and a few other countries. Sheriff Anderson has scored big points with Wiah by developing a drivers education program for his refugee clients.
Wiah has not seen any discrimination or targeting of his clients since the program began. When the refugees arrive, part of their orientation is a “cultural orientation,” where they learn about the role of law enforcement and whom to call in case they encounter trouble.
The challenge for Wiah and his clients is that many of them come from countries where law enforcement resembles a paramilitary force.
“The people we work with are different culturally,” he explained. “There is a fear of engagement with law enforcement because of their experience in their country of origin. Our folks are coming from countries where they don’t have trust in law enforcement. We don’t want them to continue with that lack of trust.”
He is hoping for more engagement between the Brattleboro police and his clients so that they can “break that taboo” of viewing law enforcement as something to fear.
“It’s very hard for our folks to distinguish between ICE and the police,” he said.
* * *
Brattleboro’s police chief, Jeremy Evans, was appointed chief this past April, after Norma Hardy retired. He became assistant chief three years earlier and has been with the force since 1998.
A few months prior to becoming chief he joined the Vermont Criminal Justice Council’s Fair and Impartial Policing Committee.
“I feel it’s important,” he told me.
“I think the policy we have right now has been built over the last several years,” Chief Evans said. “It’s pretty well grounded. It’s been tweaked a little over the years. It’s difficult. You want to build a policy that’s all encompassing, but also understandable, translatable, and something that a police officer at 1 o’clock in the morning can easily incorporate into what they’re doing.
“I think the policy helps and guides,” Evans said. “The goal is to support [officers] to do positive and professional work. Right now I think the policy does that pretty well.”
As long as he’s been a police officer, Evans said, “we haven’t put a priority, there never was a priority, on trying to identify people who were here legally or not.”
He said he hasn’t paid much attention to immigration status because “it’s important that when we’re building community trust [...] we need that trust to be with the whole community. We don’t want someone who is undocumented here being victimized by someone else then not reporting it because they’re undocumented.”
Chief Evans does not think that making the FIPP policy into law is a good idea. He feels that going through the legislative process — through the committee structure and the House and Senate and special interest groups — to create a law, and then needing to repeat the process to change or update it, would be too cumbersome and restrictive.
Evans feels that with the Brattleboro Retreat in town, the community is subject to higher levels of mental health issues than other communities. This had led to emphasizing more training for officers and collaboration between Health Care and Rehabilitation Services (HCRS). Over the past few years, this program to embed social workers with police liaisons to address health care issues has been expanded considerably.
* * *
Rep. Michelle Bos-Lun of Westminster, who represents Westminster, Rockingham, and Brookline in the state Legislature, is another public official who is deeply concerned about mental health and its relationship to the criminal justice system.
When I talked to her on the phone, she was still disturbed about Scott Garvey, the 55-year-old man who moved to Putney from Memphis a little over a year ago in hopes of finding better mental health care. Scott had struggled with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia for most of his adult life. His younger sister, Kara Garvey-Knapp, a teacher in Dummerston, started to make calls to HCRS to get Scott connected to treatment and counseling.
Instead, barely a week in Vermont, Scott Garvey’s treatment plan was abruptly aborted when he was shot dead in his new apartment by a young state trooper on the evening of July 7, 2025.
The day before, as reported by the media and corroborated by the Vermont State Police’s own timeline, Scott was paranoid and fearful, and his behavior started to escalate. A mental health screener spoke to Scott on the phone, and he spoke about “suicide by cop,” so the VSP did not send any troopers that evening.
The next day, Kara brought her mother to the house and Scott was “still very afraid,” she told Vermont Public. Both Kara and Scott called the HCRS hotline that morning.
The situation escalated hour by hour throughout the day.
Kara returned to the Putney Landing apartment around 2 p.m. to give police the key to the apartment but told the troopers at the scene that Scott was “deathly afraid of you.” When she asked the troopers if she could talk to her brother through the door, they refused.
About 4 p.m., Kara got a call from Scott and he told her a woman was going to come talk to him, without cops, and she was going to bring him coffee and cigarettes.
“I think it’s gonna be OK,” he said.
But 15 minutes later a judge approved a request for state police to check the house and arrest Scott for criminal threats and disorderly conduct.
About 4:30 the troopers entered the apartment and, when the young trooper shined his light on Scott, he thought he had a rifle. The trooper fired seven shots and three of them hit Garvey.
(The family had previously informed the police that Scott did not own guns or weapons and was physically disabled and used a walker.)
Police accounts describe Scott as holding a “metal pole,” which the trooper believed in good faith to be a rifle. Scott’s brother, Shawn Garvey, has pointed out that it was Scott’s cane.
* * *
Scott Garvey’s death was the most recent in a string of Vermont police shootings involving people experiencing mental health crises.
Nationally, nearly a quarter of all police shootings involve a person with mental or behavioral health conditions, according to a recent study by the John Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions and Vanderbilt University. Research found that 67% of all shootings involving someone suffering a mental health crisis were fatal.
“A lot of police calls involve people who are being impacted by their mental health,” Rep. Bos-Lun told me. “Ideally, the police are not the right people to respond to those calls.”
“We have some really great models like a crisis team model, where two people will go to a crisis scene and work with an individual and help to de-escalate them and often that can happen without the police needing to be involved at all,” she said.
“We have those crisis workers all over the state but we don’t have them 24/7,” Rep. Bos-Lun added. “Sometimes the police will make a decision that supersedes the crisis team or whoever has been managing the situation.”
A related issue that Rep. Bos-Lun brought to my attention is that the Vermont Criminal Justice Council has a statewide use-of-force policy “which is a de-escalation policy particularly relevant for individuals experiencing a mental health crisis.”
“So this policy is a recommended policy but it’s not in statute,” she said. “So when an officer or series of officers take a situation and don’t follow the use-of-force policy, it’s not as easy to hold people accountable.”
Rep. Bos-Lun filed a bill, H.613, that would have put that policy into statute, which “would have given a higher level of accountability to follow that policy.”
Time ran out in the last legislation session before the bill could be adequately considered. Rep. Bos-Lun plans to introduce it again in the next session but break it into two bills.
In terms of Sen. Vyhovsky’s goal to codify the FIPP, Rep. Bos-Lun thinks “it would be a good idea.”
“I think there are many times in government where we spend an awful lot of time researching best practices and best policies and what has worked well in other states, and then we never get around to applying it in our state in a formal way,” she said. “Making a recommendation is not the same as putting something into statute, and I think taking an important idea like Fair and Impartial Policing or de-escalation in the use of force policy, I think these deserve to be in statute so they have a higher level of being taken seriously.”
The most important thing, she continued, “is that our police officers are trained well so that they’re going to have the best decision-making capacity when they are meeting a crisis of whatever kind. And a lot of their work is going to involve crisis, it comes with the job.”
* * *
Although Rep. Bos-Lun and Chief Evans both cited the critical nature of the mental health issue and the importance of officer training, they do have different perspectives.
“Vermont is tied for last with a couple of states — it might be three other states — […] for the lowest number of hours for training regarding mental health and de-escalation for police agencies, which is eight hours,” she said.
“The average number of training hours that is required in other states is 15. There are states that do as many as 40 hours, and honestly I think that 40 hours would provide us with the best-prepared officers, because these are issues that are going to be impacting their performance almost every single day.
“One single crisis where an officer shoots and it turns out the person ends up dying, it’s bad for everybody,” she emphasized.
When the legislative session started this past January, Bos-Lun said, the two most important bills for her were this mental health and policing and victims service bill and the masking and identification bill for police officers.
“Many, many people wanted that masking bill to pass,” she stressed. “When I had a constituent meeting, the week before the final processing of the bill, 100% of the people in the room wanted us to move forward with the most intensive interpretation of the masking policy, which means both feds and state and local officers would be impacted. Because it was very much a unanimous feeling that we do not want this kind of behavior happening in our state.”
Rep. Bos-Lun said that “we want to prevent it in whatever way we can.”
“And we don’t know if it will work, but we need to try, and we need to send the message that [...] this is not acceptable to us,” she said.
The masking bill was scaled back after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit blocked California from enforcing a similar anti-mask rule against federal agencies.
As more states pass similar laws, “the more circuit courts that hear it, it may be that a different circuit court will have a different decision,” Rep. Bos-Lun said.
“So I absolutely think that we will move forward early in the session to try to get this kind of policy in place and at all levels of policing because I believe we shouldn’t have our local officers or state officers or our federal officers operating in secrecy.”
On the Senate side, Tanya Vyhovsky is also looking forward to the next session with determination and conviction.
“I think this year we made some important strides forward, but I think there’s a lot more we can do to protect people,” she said. “And I do think that we need to codify FIPP into law. Also, I think we need more of an outside oversight of police.”
“What we’re seeing at the federal government is more and more willingness to trample on people’s rights and willingness to deploy fear and chaos,” she said. “It is irresponsible to assume it can’t happen everywhere. I think we need to be preparing for it everywhere.”
This Voices Dispatch by Tom Boswell was written for The Commons.
This piece, published in print in the Voices section or as a column in the news sections, represents the opinion of the writer. In the newspaper and on this website, we strive to ensure that opinions are based on fair expression of established fact. In the spirit of transparency and accountability, The Commons is reviewing and developing more precise policies about editing of opinions and our role and our responsibility and standards in fact-checking our own work and the contributions to the newspaper. In the meantime, we heartily encourage civil and productive responses at [email protected].