BRATTLEBORO-"It's not about ordinance or no ordinance," said Mel Motel, co-director of Restorative Justice Programs at Interaction: Youth Services and Restorative Justice. "It's about a third way. What can we build instead?"
Motel was one of five panelists who proposed alternatives to the town's recently adopted Acceptable Community Conduct ordinance at a Nov. 18 public information meeting at Brooks Memorial Library.
Opponents of the ordinance have obtained signatures from the 5% of registered voters necessary to trigger a Special Representative Town Meeting to debate and possibly override the Selectboard's decision.
The meeting will be held on Thursday, Dec. 12, at 6 p.m. at Academy School.
The information session was organized by the Community Safety Organizing Team (CSOT), which defines itself as a group of community organizers, service providers, experienced leaders, and "people with a deep understanding of community safety needs in Windham County."
Addressing an audience of more than 100 in-person and Zoom participants, Sonia Silbert, a town resident and event co-organizer, said that "Brattleboro is experiencing compounding crises that result in a lot of human suffering, both seen and unseen - substance use, homelessness, the housing crisis - that have all increased over the past few years.
"Many of us in town have been frustrated by perceived inaction on these issues," Silbert said.
Silbert said that the Brattleboro Selectboard has not acted upon the recommendations for alternatives to policing outlined in a 2020 community safety report that the board's Community Safety Review Committee issued.
Instead, Silbert said, the town has responded to "the outrage of downtown business owners" who have called for increased policing downtown.
Public safety: a Selectboard priority
At a series of standing-room-only meetings this summer, business owners and community members expressed their frustration with an increase in disorderly conduct and crime downtown.
"A small number of people are causing chaos in the community," Jim Baker, a consultant with Gov. Phil Scott's Public Safety Enhancement Team (PSET), told the Selectboard at its July 23 meeting.
An analysis of calls to the Brattleboro Police Department (BPD) from 2022 to 2023 showed that 32% of calls were related to disorder and 20 people accounted for 5% of all police activity in the past three years.
The Selectboard's response was multi-pronged.
On Aug. 20, the board voted to increase the BPD's Brattleboro Response Assistance Team (BRAT) staffing and add more cameras downtown.
When fully staffed, BRAT will include a community resource specialist, four level-2 police officers, three social work police liaisons, and a data entry analyst.
Additionally, the Selectboard voted to spend no more than $707,000 of the town's revolving loan fund to establish a police substation at the Transportation Center on Flat Street. The substation will house BRAT staff.
These efforts, along with the Acceptable Community Conduct ordinance, are part of the town's Downtown Safety Action Plan, which also includes developing a community safety messaging campaign, working for state legislative reform, and taking other actions to address public health and safety in town.
The Acceptable Community Conduct ordinance, which the Selectboard approved in September, establishes safety zones, where prohibited behaviors like drug use and dealing, physical threats, and property damage are subject to penalties up to $200.
While town officials can issue no-trespass orders for prohibited behaviors in these safety zones, the orders can be waived if the recipient participates in an approved restoration plan, including drug treatment, mental health support, and/or completion of a restorative justice process.
'It's not going to work'
Motel acknowledged the town's attempt to include restorative justice practices in the ordinance, explaining that restorative justice aims to build community and address conflict while repairing harm and restoring relationships.
However, Motel questioned the town staff's ability to mediate the process.
"Who's determining what the appropriate drug treatment or mental health support program is?" Motel asked. "Does the town have the capacity and expertise to make these determinations?"
"Do the organizations in this town have the capacity to support that work, those referrals that will be coming?" Motel added. "Will the town be providing additional resources to increase capacity to provide mental health treatment, and to provide addiction recovery?"
"Will the town provide support for people who need health insurance to receive these services?" Motel asked.
"I think [the restorative justice component of the ordinance] is a really good attempt to provide an off-ramp, but it demonstrates a lack of understanding about what is needed for people to get well in this community," Motel said. "It's not going to work."
Instead, Motel proposed expanding existing local restorative justice programs, like Project Connections, a collaboration between Interaction: Youth Services and Restorative Justice, Health Care and Rehabilitation Services (HCRS), and Groundworks Collaborative.
The Project Connections restorative practices coordinator works at the Groundworks drop-in center and with local affordable housing properties to resolve conflicts before they escalate.
Additionally, Project Connections works through tenant councils to build tenant power and community, which lays the groundwork for restorative practices.
"We can be part of a whole network of responses to distress that don't primarily rely on police to solve problems that we can solve among ourselves with some skills training and infrastructure," Motel said.
Accountability comes from a sense of belonging
"I can really appreciate, on a certain level, that the idea behind the ordinance is an attempt at accountability," said Calvin Moen, a panelist at the Nov. 18 meeting and a psychiatric survivor, educator, and advocate in southern Vermont.
But accountability comes from a sense of belonging to a place, he said.
"Fines and arrests lead to deepening poverty, more housing insecurity, and frayed social connections," Moen told participants.
"We're talking about an ordinance that really affects unhoused folks who are just going to be more surveilled with increased police presence."
As an alternative to policing, Moen and other CSOT members are proposing the establishment of a Community Center and Immediate Emotional Support Center using state opioid settlement funds.
"The Community Center would be a hub for activities, events, socializing, and resource distribution," Moen said. "It's really making sure that basic needs are met for anybody who walks through the door. There would be no criteria for help, it's fully voluntary and confidential," Moen said.
The co-located Emotional Support Center would be "an essential, trauma-preventing, cost-saving alternative to the emergency department," according to the project proposal.
The first-year budget for the project is estimated to be $1.7 million.
While both centers will prioritize the needs of people who are unhoused, using drugs, and at high risk for carceral interventions and/or death, they will also be available to the community at large.
Moen said that the proposed support centers would incorporate the values of Intentional Peer support, which relies on staff with lived experience to help others through their crises.
His work at the Wildflower Alliance, a grassroots harm reduction and human rights organization in western Massachusetts, has informed his trust in the effectiveness of peer support, community leadership, harm reduction, and restorative justice practices.
"I've never known a community center that's operating with the values of Intentional Peer Support, community leadership, harm reduction, and restorative justice to get a no trespass order on its community members or to call police on them," Moen said in an email to The Commons.
"One reason, I believe, is that these spaces are built on relationships, not service provision," he said. "When folks are connected and feel a sense of belonging to a community and are invested in its success, they want to preserve those relationships.
"So when there is damage, the community seeks repair. There are co-created, pre-established agreements, norms, and practices to move toward repair and away from punishment," Moen wrote.
Visions for alternatives
Panelist Laura Stamas, a Brattleboro resident and CSOT member, highlighted Middlebury, Vermont and Northampton, Massachusetts as examples of communities exploring alternatives to policing social disruption.
"We can envision other possibilities that are going to create a greater sense of belonging in our community," Stamas said. "I really appreciate that there are other towns that have envisioned other possibilities [to policing]."
Northampton is working to establish a Community Resilience Hub to address homelessness and panhandling, which a 2019 study by the mayor's office identified as being "a source of public concern, debate, and controversy" for decades.
In an October interview with The Commons, Carolyn Misch, director of the Northampton Planning and Sustainability Office, said that the idea of the hub emerged from conversations with community members, including unhoused people.
The hub aims to provide day shelter services, including housing information, mental health, and drug addiction services, as well as hot food, storage, showers, and laundry facilities.
A proposed geothermal energy system contributes to the project's estimated $8 million cost.
"We're not saying it's eliminating panhandling, but we think that many of these folks need services," said Misch. "They need money, and they don't have anywhere else to be during the day."
Northampton also hosts a frog statue, donated by a local artist, that serves as a collection vault for public donations. Funds are distributed to local social service agencies that assist people experiencing homelessness.
'We are absolutely making a difference'
Interlude, in Middlebury, was established in 2023 as an alternative to hospitalization for adults in mental health crises.
The facility, a program of the Counseling Service of Addison County, provides a "voluntary, home-like, trauma-sensitive space that includes a living room, kitchen, bathroom, private comfort relaxation room, and a space for music, movement and more," according to its website.
In an interview with The Commons, Interlude's peer support specialists Nate Bamberg-Johnson and Sean Ross said that Interlude was created "in response to seeing how ill-equipped the traditional system was and to try and have a compassionate and effective response to people navigating crisis."
Interlude is staffed by people with lived experience who use trauma-informed approaches to working with clients.
Noting that Middlebury has seen "a pretty dramatic uptick in its unhoused population recently," Bamberg-Johnson says that he has worked with a large number of people experiencing homelessness.
"Homelessness is a huge stressor on the folks going through it, with its own flavor of crisis and struggle," he said.
Discussing the causes and solutions to the social disorder many Vermont towns are grappling with, Bamberg-Johnson said, "It's really complicated and nuanced, and I don't know that there's a right answer to dealing with it.
"But I think that there are some answers that could be more disruptive and destructive than others. I think what we are doing is part of a better answer," Bamberg-Johnson said.
"In peer support models like ours, there's often less physical violence because we are not in positions of power," Ross said. "When police are involved in a crisis, there's often a lot of fear, both with the police and with the people who are in the crisis. In peer support, we're meeting people as other human beings."
Bamberg-Johnson and Ross say it's difficult to quantify their work's effectiveness.
"Regardless of how many people come in and tell us that we saved their life, we don't really capture that data in any demonstrable way for outside entities," Bamberg-Johnson said.
"A lot of evidence is anecdotal," he added. "But we are absolutely making a difference. We're changing things pretty deeply and dramatically."
A call to invest in what works
"Through the work we're doing, we're trying to move beyond seeing trauma and behavior as disorder, and rather towards listening to it as communication," Hannah Sorila, a CSOT member, told The Commons.
"For example, when the [Brattleboro Food] Co-op saw an increase in folks stealing food, they asked why folks would be stealing food, and saw the solution as offering people free food because people were hungry."
Sorila and her fellow organizers recognize the limitations of available services to assist people in crisis.
"That's exactly what we are hoping to invest in - more people to call, places for folks to go, and services to be offered - rather than pouring our time and resources into the thing that has been proven to cause harm," she said.
This News item by Ellen Pratt was written for The Commons.