Green Mountain Daily has obtained a copy of this open letter to the Montpelier City Council from its author, Aaron Kromash, who authorized us to publish it in its entirety.

An open letter to:

The Honorable Mary Hooper

Councilors

 Tom Golonka

 T. Andrew Hooper

 Sarah Jarvis

 Jim Sheridan

 Nancy Sherman

 Alan H. Weiss

By e-mail

Dear Mayor Hooper and Council Members:

I hope the new year begins well for you.  In advance of your Jan 12 meeting, I am writing to you to address the subject of “Electronic Control Devices” (i.e., Tasers), which I know is on the next meeting agenda.

Because Montpelier is my capital and a city I enjoy and visit, and because I will therefore be affected by your decisions on this issue, I am writing to brief you on relevant facts I have learned in the course of preparing two public information programs on Tasers for the towns of Greensboro and Hardwick last November.  I have reviewed the documents provided in your packet by Chief Facos, and I find that they do need supplementation with substantial facts of concern to the public.

In the first instance, you should know that Tasers more resemble firearms than any other weapon in police arsenals, despite the fact that the VLCT “Response to Resistance” explicitly equates Tasers with chemical sprays.  The only reason that this latter comparison is even credible is that Taser probes are fired by compressed nitrogen, not gunpowder, and this design was deliberate, being an attempt to completely circumvent any federal ATF regulation.

Nonetheless, Tasers are in fact lethal weapons,

Nonetheless, Tasers are in fact lethal weapons, and though none of the documents in your packet mentions Taser-related deaths explicitly, the most comprehensive online registry of these statistics (reference below) lists 530 individuals who have died to date after tasering by police in the US and Canada alone.  The most recent of these fatalities is Kelly Wayne Sinclair, age 41, a mentally ill man tasered by police in Amarillo, Texas on January 5, 2011.  Statistics from other countries are not readily available but would surely add to this total.

Likewise, please do not be confused by the IACP printout in your packet (“What Every Police Chief Should Know…”) stating that the injury rate from tasering is lower than 1%.  These statistics are not collected through mandated reporting and are often prepared by the manufacturer of the weapon, Taser International.  They exclude primary injuries caused by the Taser itself (i.e., puncture wounds, bleeding, and burns), and they often exclude “non-serious” secondary injuries that individuals incur when they fall to the ground after tasering, as all individuals do.  The Attorney General’s report and other references below indicate that roughly 20-30% of people shot with Tasers require medical treatment for injuries such as punctures, contusions, lacerations, burns, fractures, and broken teeth.  To some extent, this phenomenon is a shifting of policing costs from the public sector to hospitals, private insurers, and the public.

Locally, even during the presentation I made in Hardwick, a man named James Anair came forth to speak publicly about how, during an adverse drug reaction, he had been tasered multiple times by Morrisville police in an incident two years prior and suffered several secondary injuries and intense, lasting psychological trauma as a result (a DVD is available).  According to the statistics you have been given, Mr. Anair should have been a rarity, but he was not, and my sense is that there are many more Vermonters who could tell similar stories if the issue were brought to a larger forum.

Were officers to have inflicted the aforementioned injuries through “hands-on” methods rather than high technology, I think the perception of police conduct would be rather different; yet, the end result is the same.  Tasers are serious weapons with the potential to injure or kill people.

For all this death and injury, you might expect to hear about more Taser-related litigation, again only lightly mentioned in your documents, and there has been much litigation, but until very recently Taser International had successfully settled every claim in secret or prevailed in litigation by virtue of its vast legal and financial resources.  These cases includes at least several claims by police officers themselves who were permanently injured in training under optimal training conditions.

Only in 2008 did Taser International lose its first product liability lawsuit, with a jury awarding $6.2 million to the estate of Robert Heston, a California man killed by multiple tasering in 2005.  And since that landmark case, the company has finally relented and begun to settle product liability suits for its defective products, the very first of which was paid just last August, when the company ceded $2.85 million to Steven Butler of California, who suffered debilitating brain damage and permanent immobility after he was shocked with a Taser.

You, who have all felt the obloquy over the city’s missing $400,000, should perhaps take these multimillion figures into account before you commit the city to a potential liability that could make $400,000 look small.  And to be rigorous, you should also consider these numbers against the $6,000 that Chief Facos cites offhandedly as the approximate recent annual cost to Montpelier for officer injuries from “combative action.”  A cost-benefit analysis is needed.

Amid the most recent lawsuits and reaction, Taser International has admitted to the need for redesign to make its weapons “safer”, bowing, for example, to pressure from none other than the Police Executive Research Forum to build in a stop control that limits the duration of electroshock that a shooter can deliver.  This new feature is supposed to be available in 2011, and I am not aware of whether Chief Facos proposes to purchase the current, now legally defective, model of Tasers, or a newer generation, but you would be advised to ask this question as well.

You should also ask the Chief many questions bearing on accountability for Taser use, where the VLCT document displays substantial weakness.  Why, for example, is “passive resistance” nowhere defined in that policy?  Does “active resistance” include techniques of civil disobedience, such as those employed in the infamous Brattleboro case reviewed by the AG report in your packet?  Does the MPD request include Taser-mounted video cameras?  Will the MPD commit to archiving and public access to Taser firing data and video footage?  Will the MPD publicly report each and every Taser deployment, including purely deterrent uses?  Satisfactory answers to all of these questions would go a long way to ensuring good community perceptions.

Despite all else I’ve written, I would not minimize the problem of officer injuries and the right of police to as safe a working environment as possible.  This is the context of Chief Facos’ request, and likewise, Sergeant Cochran’s survey, and Burlington Chief Schirling’s memorandum.  But these documents are largely anecdotal, and they contain few statistics, little interpretation of the numbers they present, and a narrow argument that is not by itself a compelling case for Tasers in Montpelier.  Though the concern for officer safety is legitimate, what you as civilian policy makers need to understand is, as the VLCT document correctly states, that use of force policy must, “serve all citizens while at the same time respecting the rights of suspects and balancing the need for officer safety.”  

But it is not the institutional mission of police to consider this balance; it is, rather, yours.  And the problem of Tasers in achieving this balance is that they seem to make of safety, civil liberties, and public finance a zero-sum game, giving to law enforcement only to the extent that they take away from others.

In considering Chief Facos’ request, it is then your job to balance all of these factors¬officer versus public safety, large-scale litigation versus occupational claims, and humane and just treatment versus cruel and unusual punishment.  In the process, you cannot rely unduly on the police perspective or privilege their concerns above all others; for, to do so would be to make the police, quite puzzlingly, a reason unto themselves, when they are only empowered in the first place to serve the public.  Simply put, you must make the MPD prove a case that seems conspicuously weak in the documents I’ve reviewed, and in the larger context of what is known about the risks and benefits of Tasers.  Yours is not a simple decision, and you should approach it with a wide perspective of knowledge, which is why I hope you will review the sources I list below.

But finally, regardless of your decisions this week, you should understand that the issue is not settled so simply.  Though this is indeed a major policy juncture for you and the city, others will follow, because the engineers at Taser International get up every day and return to work.  Next year you may be asked to fund a purchase of the Taser X3 triple-shot Taser gun, or the XREP Taser shotgun shell, or the vision-disrupting “Dazer Laser”, and the requests for ever more advanced weaponry will not end.  If there is, then, something enduring in the values that underlie your policy decisions, I urge you to focus on that instinct as much as what the current technology promises.

Sincerely Yours,

Aaron M. Kromash

Greensboro VT

 UPDATE: NEXT TASER HEARING THURSDAY, JANUARY 20.

The next hearing on the Tasers will be held Thursday night. This will be the time for the council to decide whether to go ahead with the purchase.

The City Manager is recommending it, so they really need to hear from you.

Date: January 12, 2011

Place: Montpelier City Hall

Time: 7:00

As we reported a couple of months ago, the Montpelier Chief of Police is asking the voters to buy Tasers for the Montpelier Police. Wednesday night is the first public hearing on the budget which, as drafted, includes the funds for the Tasers. This hearing will be your chance to let the Council know how you feel about deployment of Tasers in the Capital City.

 We've covered the issue many times in the past. Its uses and especially abuses in and out of Vermont are well documented. Because I think the acquisition and deployment of Tasers in Montpelier would be a dangerous step, I will be there tomorrow night, and I hope you will join me.

1. Tasers are deadly force. While touted as nonlethal or “less lethal” (note the ass-covering change in terminology), there are hundreds of documented cases of deaths resulting from or arising after Taser shocks.

2. Defenders of Tasers will argue that they should not be considered lethal, or that it is improper to call the Taser the cause of death in the known cases. They will argue that the actual cause of death was some previously unknown medical condition. What they conveniently ignore is that  any one of us could have one of those previously unknown medical conditions, and that the police won't know until after the administer the shock. 

3. Taser deployment lowers the threshhold. Every time they argue for Tasers they claim they need them because Tasers save lives. Then they wind up using them when someone's making a nuisance of themselves at the corner store. 

Join us tomorrow night. Speak out against the irresponsible deployment and use of deadly force.

Update #4 To take over Jack’s diary a bit more, WaPo’s website has a pdf screen capture from Sarah Palin’s Facebook page, which has Rep. Giffords among electoral targets with crosshair imagery. Here’s the link.

I don’t know how others are feeling about this. I was shocked and then glum… now I feel so angry I probably shouldn’t be around other people for a little while. I realize that’s probably not helpful. — odum again

Update #3: Lost in the understandable concern about the Congresswoman is the fact that, in the same incident, 17 people were injured and the list of those killed includes Rep. Giffords’ Outreach Director Gabe Zimmerman, an unnamed 9-year old girl, and Federal Judge John Rall.

Here’s a clip from last March, in which Rep. Giffords expresses concern about being “targeted” by Sarah Palin over her politics. It’s disturbing to watch, given today’s events (h/t TPM):

I mean, people don’t — they really need to realize that the rhetoric and firing people up and, you know, even things, for example, we’re on Sarah Palin’s targeted list. But the thing is that the way that she has it depicted has the crosshairs of a gunsight over our district.

— odum

Update #2: Welch statement on Arizona shooting –julie

HARTLAND, VT – Rep. Peter Welch issued the following statement

Saturday in response to the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, a

fellow member of the House class of 2006.

“Gabby Giffords is one of my closest friends in Congress. A persistent

and effective legislator, she stands out for her warmth, genuine

attentiveness and concern for all. Gabby is one of the best listeners

I know. Her kindness and graciousness know no bounds.

“As this tragic situation develops, Margaret and I are keeping Gabby,

her family, her staff and the many others involved in this horrific

episode in our thoughts and prayers.”

UPDATE: There’s a lot of conflicting information, but Rep. Giffords is still alive, but in surgery. She was reportedly shot at point blank range.

– odum

Giffords Shot Dead By Assassin

Josh Marshall | January  8, 2011,  2:13PM

       We now have apparently confirmed reports that Rep. Gabrielle Giffords  (D-AZ) was shot and killed this morning by an as-yet-unidentified  assassin at a “Congress on Your Corner” event outside a grocery store in  her district in Tucson, Arizona.

I would concede that even the most unhinged Tea Party Republicans probably don’t intend to incite their followers to violence and political assassination. On the other hand, what message do they think they’re sending when they say it may be time to exercise our “Second Amendment remedies”?

Entergy takes another step in its campaign to win the trust of Vermonters.

Here's the sequence of events, as reported in today's Brattleboro Reformer.

Step 1: April, 2010–find leaks in three of the actuators for Vermont Yankee's four safety relief valves. Fix the leaks during refueling.

Step 2:

In an analysis completed on Oct. 25, Yankee engineers concluded “there was firm evidence that the condition may have existed for a period of time greater than allowed by the technical specifications.”

 Step 3: Report the event to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission on December 22.

Step 4: keep running those sappy “I am Vermont Yankee” ads on TV. Ignore the fact that nobody much cares how nice the employees of Vermont Yankee are, but we care very much about whether they are competent enough to run the plant and honest enough to be trusted with the public health and safety. I keep waiting for them to identify one of their employes as a fork and spoon operator from Sector 7g, but so far no luck.)

Good work for Reformer reporter Bob Audette to come up with this. The source for some of his analysis was an e-mail from Vermont Yankee. Apparently no explanation was available for why the information about the leaks, which VY had in April, or its analysis of the leaks, which they had in October, wasn't disclosed to the NRC until just before Christmas.

Oh, and if you're wondering, the collection of press releases and news updates on the Vermont Yankee web page  doesn't say anything about this latest set of leaks. Not even in the section they call “We're all entitled to our own opinions, but not our own facts”.

Maybe, in Entergy lexicon, “facts” means “stuff we couldn't keep covered up any longer”.

If you had to say something nice about the Republicans, I guess it would be that they at least have the decency to to recognize how vile and shameful their constant appeals to racism are. 

It's a long and sordid history, going back to Nixon's Southern Strategy, but we can also recall the multiple explicit appeals to racism by Ronald Reagan, including his choice of Philadelphia, Mississippi to kick off his presidential campaign, his references to food stamp fraud by “big bucks” who use them to buy liquor, or his support for the racist Bob Jones University.

More recently we have the racist campaign sponsored by the odious Lee Atwater, who capped off his life with a phony apology for his racist acts.

Green Mountain Daily has learned from multiple sources that Michael Hartman will not be reappointed to serve as Commissioner of the Department of Mental Health.

At this time no information is available as to who will be chosen.

The Department of Mental Health has had a rocky path during Jim Douglas's term in office, moving from Waterbury to Burlington and back, moving from being an independent department to a division of the department of health and back, and constantly struggling to regain Medicare and Medicaid certification, lost after two patients committed suicide at the State Hospital in 2003.

Advocates have been critical of the Douglas administration's approach, pointing out that they have had no clear direction, no substantive plan to either fix the problems at the State Hospital or replace it, and have treated the patients at Waterbury in a way that no other chronically ill population would have been subjected to.

Despite a letter-writing campaign to keep him, Hartman's departure is no surprise. Earlier this year legislators were furious when the administration sat on the news that VSH had once again lost its certification, even though they knew it was going to cost the state millions of dollars in lost federal funding and the legislature was debating the final budget, which included the money from Medicare and Medicaid.

Back in March I made this observation about the State Hospital mess and the Douglas administration:

Second, when is this going to start costing Douglas? The Hospital has been decertified almost continuously since 2003, or almost the entire time that Douglas has been governor, and his administration has essentially done nothing about it. At least, nothing but waste time, come up with unrealistic and unfeasible plans, and we're no closer to a replacement for VSH than we were seven years ago. You walk around the State House and legislators of all parties are openly scornful of the idea that the administration has any kind of plan to do anything, anytime.

Could it be that Michael Hartman is the one Douglas administration official to pay any significant cost for the failures of the outgoing governor?

Thanks to Violetta for letting me know about this.  

Cross posted from Rational Resistance.  

WASHINGTON – The House may vote next week on a measure that could damage U.S. relations with critical ally Turkey: a resolution declaring the World War I-era killings of Armenians a genocide.  

We've written about this before, but just to refresh your recollection, the Turks slaughtered a million and a half Armenians around the time of World War I in what is considered the first act of genocide of the Twentieth Century.  

Turkey, of course, doesn't like it when people have the bad taste to remind them of this. Turkey, a NATO ally with a pivotal role for U.S. interests in the Middle East and Afghanistan, has warned that the resolution's approval could jeopardize U.S-Turkish cooperation and set back negotiations aimed at opening the border between Turkey and Armenia. Turkey also currently holds one of the rotating seats in the United Nations' Security Council that will have to approve sanctions against Iran.  

Here's what Barack Obama said about the genocide in 2008:  

I also share with Armenian Americans – so many of whom are descended from genocide survivors – a principled commitment to commemorating and ending genocide. That starts with acknowledging the tragic instances of genocide in world history. As a U.S. Senator, I have stood with the Armenian American community in calling for Turkey's acknowledgement of the Armenian Genocide. Two years ago, I criticized the Secretary of State for the firing of U.S. Ambassador to Armenia, John Evans, after he properly used the term "genocide" to describe Turkey's slaughter of thousands of Armenians starting in 1915. I shared with Secretary Rice my firmly held conviction that the Armenian Genocide is not an allegation, a personal opinion, or a point of view, but rather a widely documented fact supported by an overwhelming body of historical evidence. The facts are undeniable. An official policy that calls on diplomats to distort the historical facts is an untenable policy. As a senator, I strongly support passage of the Armenian Genocide Resolution (H.Res.106 and S.Res.106), and as President I will recognize the Armenian Genocide.  

Since then he has been less forthcoming. For instance, here's what he said earlier this year:  

“On this solemn day of remembrance, we pause to recall that 95 years ago one of the worst atrocities of the 20th century began,” Mr. Obama said in the statement, which largely echoed the same language he used on this date a year ago. “In that dark moment of history, 1.5 million Armenians were massacred or marched to their death in the final days of the Ottoman Empire.”  

Still a strong condemnation, but not what he promised, and not what the world knows to be the case.  

The time is long overdue. Call on your representatives in the House and Senate to support the Armenian genocide resolution.

Interested in renting a house or apartment? Or faced with the need to rent and hoping you'll find a city government that will protect your rights?

If so, you might as well forget about Barre. The mayor there, Tom Lauzon, has made it absolutely clear that he has no use for tenants or tenants' rights, and he doesn't care who knows it.

 By now he's got a history. For instance, earlier this year Lauzon drafted a new proposed housing ordinance to fine tenants when their landlords violate the law by not taking care of their property. Oh yes, and he wants to develop a blacklist for tenants, so landlords can share information about who doesn't pay their rent, who might be a bit too assertive in standing up for their rights. You get the idea.

It's just that when the tenants and their advocates got the chance to address the city council, the proposal kind of . . .  went away.

But that's not all. For instance, Barre has an ordinance that says that if you're a tenant and your landlord doesn't pay the water bill, your water gets cut off. Not the landlord's water, your water.

My colleagues at Legal Aid are suing the city in federal court to get this policy overturned, and they had a big win this week. The case was filed as a class action, and District Judge Christina Reiss has ruled that the case can proceed as a class action. This is a great step in the march to invalidate the water ordinance.

If you were the mayor and you heard about this policy, your first reaction might be, "What? We cut off tenants' water when they don't owe us any money? How is that fair?"

Not Lauzon, though. Barre is apparently going to defend this to the bitter end.

But you haven't heard the worst of it. It's not just tenants he doesn't like. In fact, just in time for the Christmas season he's apparently found a group he dislikes even more than he dislikes tenants.

Wait for it.

It's homeless people and the people who try to help them.

According to the Times Argus:

It was a surreal session.
At the outset Lauzon described the meeting he personally requested with Kim Woolaver, executive director of Good Samaritan Haven, as “an informal, cozy conversation,” repeatedly stressing he “appreciated and admired” the work of the shelter, its staff and volunteers.
However, the meeting quickly morphed into a Lauzon-led interrogation that seemed to catch Woolaver off guard and had at least one member of the City Council squirming in his seat.

‘Tis the season, I guess.

I don’t live in Barre. I don’t get a vote there. I can be pretty sure, though, that if my mayor had declared war on tenants and homeless people in my town, I’d be pretty unhappy about it.

Cross posted from Rational Resistance.

We're still dealing with the aftermath of the deal Obama cut with Mitch McConnell the other day, even though it's really too early to tell if we're in the aftermath yet.

There's been quite a range of opinion, from overheated claims that Obama was always just a Republican in disguise or that he never planned to eliminate the millionaires' tax cut, end DADT, or promulgate real health care reform; to arguments that he actually made a good deal that we should all be celebrating, not criticizing, or that people need to understand that coming across as an angry black man won't help him get anywhere.

I think all of these claims are wrong, mainly because they're missing the point. People do feel betrayed, and with some justification. On the other hand, inspirational as his candidacy was, Candidate Obama was always just a moderately liberal centrist Democrat, and that is generally how he has governed. The sense of betrayal is more the result of disappointed supporters realizing that he didn't live up to their projections than his actual statements.

There are plenty of respectable liberal economists and analysts who make the point that the deal Obama made, given the circumstances, was the best he could have made; I suspect this is true, but there is some reason to question it.

The key phrase, though, is given the circumstances. To me, the question isn't why he made the deal he made, but why he let himself get maneuvered into such a position of weakness, and why he has repeatedly done that during his presidency.

What I've observed is that Obama has repeatedly failed or refused to take the initiative on issues that were important to him and to the Democratic base. For instance, take health care. In 1994, when Bill Clinton tried to pass health care reform he was attacked for setting up a shop in the White House to come up with a plan; it crashed and burned. Obama overlearned that lesson by deciding to just leave it all up to Congress. We know what happened: the Republicans spent the summer of 2009 lying about death panels; Senate leadership wasted their time trying to curry favor with people like Susan Collins, Olympia Snowe, and Charles Grassley, who were never going to support anything; Obama tried to buy off special interests to get their support; but fundamentally Obama never changed his approach.

We have seen the same thing in the Middle East. Obama has failed to articulate a vision for peace in the Middle East and as a consequence he was forced to offer big payments to Israel in exchange for the hope at a token 90-day suspension of illegal settlements. We can actually be glad Netanyahu decided not to take the deal, even as it betrays Obama's weakness.

That's what happened with taxes. We're told that the polls still show that strong majorities of Americans don't support extending the millionaires' and billionaires' tax cut, but it's probably going to happen. It didn't have to, though. For months liberals have been saying that Obama should have introduced his own tax cut, he could even call it the Obama Tax Plan, that extended the tax cuts up to $250,000, lifted the FICA cap, and probably did a few other changes to make the tax system more progressive, and pushed it through Congress. It would have put the Republicans in the position of going into the election either voting for it or voting no on tax cuts for 98% of the American people. Back in September even Boehner said that if he had to he would have voted for that bill. So why not make the Republicans vote for it? Before the election is when he had some leverage, not after they won.

The same is true with the federal employees' pay freeze. I don't have an opinion on whether it was a good idea or not, but I'm sure it's something the Republicans would have wanted. They might have wanted it enough to trade something for it, but they didn't have to because Obama gave it up unilaterally. Would it have been worth enough for them to agree to extend unemployment? We'll never know, will we? For that matter, there are plenty of observers who think the Republicans, if forced to it, would have voted to extend unemployment benefits because they wouldn't have wanted to look like the economic royalists they are. I doubt that, but again, Obama never tried that, so we'll never know.

So where do we all stand? I'm not really sure. Obama has clearly mishandled this situation very badly. He will probably get the deal through, pretty much as written, but that remains to be seen. The price for the deal, though, is not just giving the Republicans the billionaires' tax cut. We've been hearing plenty of liberals who supported Obama who are now saying he has permanently lost their support. We also hear people saying it's time for a primary challenge.

I think this is misguided. History tells us that an incumbent president who gets a serious primary challenge loses, either during the primaries or in the general election. The list is a long one: Johnson, Ford, Carter, Bush. It could certainly happen to Obama in 2012, although much depends on how the economy is doing.

If that happens, though, we are not going to be trading an unsatisfactory President Obama for a preferable President Kucinich, Clinton, or some other liberal Democrat. The liberal wing of the Democratic Party is not the strongest part of the party at the present time, so there's no guarantee that we will get a more liberal nominee. (If you'll remember, the only serious candidate in 2008 who was more liberal than Obama was John Edwards. I invite you to contemplate what a disaster that would have been.)

No. If Obama faces a serious primary challenge in 2012 the likeliest outcome is the election of Mitt Romney, Sarah Palin, or some other vicious Republican. Do you seriously think that would be better than reelecting Obama?

If you do, please tell me what color the moon on your planet is.

Cross posted from Rational Resistance.

In my post earlier this week I mentioned one of the real problems in Obama's tax capitulation: the payroll tax cut.

If you recall, one of the biggest victories we had during the Bush administration was the defeat of Bush's plan to kill off Social Security by privatizing it. Hint: aren't you glad the Social Security trust fund wasn't in the market at the time of the 2008 crash? It was a hard fight because the Republicans have opposed Social Security from FDR's time, but for decades Social Security was considered the third rail of American politics. Now it's lost that status, giving Republicans free rein to attack the most effective anti-poverty program in our history.

But why is Obama going over to their side and trying to undermine Social Security? And trying to convince us it's a good deal for working people?

Make no mistake, the proposed deal shortchanges Social Security by cutting the FICA tax. For years, Republicans have been attacking Social Security, mainly by claiming that it's about to run out of money. How does it make sense to make their argument by taking money out of the fund?

As this story on yesterday's All Things Considered points out, the plan is actually to replace the lost FICA money with general fund revenues. In my view that doesn't make it a better deal; if anything, it weakens the support that people have had for Social Security from the beginning. It's just a bad idea. Even if the deal had nothing else wrong with it, this in itself would be enough to say we should fight it.