Black and white and hot all over

Brattleboro policing issues reach the boiling point

By Kathryn Casa | Vermont Guardian

Posted July 21, 2006

To the residents of Brattleboro’s Clark Street, the issue is black and white. When Paul Canon looks out the window of his home, he sees drug dealers. When his neighbors look back, they see a stalker. Both sides have taken their complaints to police, and that’s where things get murky.

In a town were police-community relations have been uneasy for years, a recent flurry of complaints about alleged racial profiling have raised civil liberties questions and ratcheted up tensions, spilling over into the poor Clark-Canal neighborhood where residents claim police are encouraging a neighbor to videotape their daily lives.

Over the past several months, the ALANA Community Organization, a minority-rights group, has fielded more than a half-dozen complaints about alleged racial profiling in traffic stops and town patrols. Executive Director Curtiss Reed has been outspoken in his calls for action, asking federal, state, and local officials to investigate.

So far, none has done so. The Vermont Attorney General’s office bounced back one traffic-stop complaint, saying it was a local issue and suggesting Reed take it up with Brattleboro Police Chief John Martin. The U.S. Civil Rights Commission’s state advisory committee has thus far failed to find a quorum to support a Brattleboro hearing on racial profiling. The call for the meeting was spurred by an ALANA survey released earlier this year found minority households had disproportionate contact with police.

The town’s fledgling Citizen Police Communication Committee (CPCC), formed in response to the December 2001 police shooting of a man in a church, has received 14 complaints in just the four months it has been open for business — six of them involving racial profiling — contrasting sharply with the police department’s claims that it gets only a handful of complaints every year.

In one, filed June 28, Ricardo Vargas, a Mexican citizen enrolled in a master’s program at the School for International Training, described a June 5 traffic stop of a car in which he was a passenger. Vargas said the police officer asked him if he had been drinking, then shined a flashlight in his face and asked if he was a U.S. citizen and whether he was in the country legally or had any ID that proved his legal status, and why he had a North Carolina driver’s license.

“His questions came one right after the other one, and the way in which he spoke to me made me feel like I had just been caught doing something wrong. It was then when I understood that I did not do anything wrong,” Vargas wrote. “I was not even driving a car that night and comprehended that the only reason he had to ask for my immigration status was the color of my skin.”

Meanwhile, as tensions in the Clark-Canal neighborhood reach a boiling point, Selectboard members are urging residents to channel their concerns through the largely powerless CPCC.

The residents’ complaints came to a head last week, when they told both the Selectboard and the CPCC at two separate meetings that Canon told them police pay him $30 per tape to record their activities. The residents said Brattleboro police officers pick up Canon’s videotapes at least twice a week from his home.

“I understand it is legal to videotape, but what is he videotaping?” said Peggy Longueil, 64, president of the Clark-Canal Neighborhood Association. “He’s videotaping my house, where I feel very violated. He stops me on the street, he tells me I’m a drug dealer.”

At a July 20 community meeting, Reed planned to call for a set of “non-negotiable” actions including a public apology from Martin and charges against Canon for allegedly misrepresenting himself as an agent of the police.

If the town takes no action to stop Canon, “it would send an ominous message to Clark Street and town residents, in general, and African American and Latino residents in particular, that the town not only condones racial profiling but is willing to absorb the cost of Mr. Canon’s habit of filing false reports,” Reed wrote last week in a letter to Town Manager Jerry Remillard.

Remillard said he is taking the situation seriously. “I’m not sure that I’m calling this a formal investigation, but it is my intent to sort all this out and get to the bottom of it,” he said. “There is a serious situation that has developed.”

Martin says his department does not pay Canon, but acknowledges that he has turned over tapes to police.

Canon admitted to the Guardian that police do not pay him, but he said they do supply him with videotapes. He said he told his neighbors that he is paid by police as a protective measure.

Canon said he makes several copies of each tape, giving one to the police and keeping a second copy locked in a safe in his home. He said he has stored hundreds of such tapes, shot with two video cameras positioned in the upstairs windows of his house and a hand-held camera.

He said he decided to record the activity on his street after police failed to respond promptly to his reports of drug deals.

He showed the Vermont Guardian a tape in which several African American men can be seen milling around and entering and exiting an apartment across the street from Canon’s house at approximately midnight and again at about 3 a.m., according to the tape’s date stamp. The tape also includes video footage of neighborhood teenagers talking outside a house and rollerblading down the street. No drug activity was readily apparently in any of the footage.

The tapes also showed neighbors openly hostile toward Canon as he videotaped them.

Jeffery Anderson, 22, said Canon is invading his privacy. “I have to be called derogatory statements from my porch when I wake up in the morning. I can’t walk on my porch and have a moment of freedom or peace. This man is violating my privacy.”

Anderson, who is black, chastised the town for having no minority police officers on its force who might help assuage the situation. “How can you understand a culture when you have none of that culture working with you? When we greet each other, when we shake hands, it’s not a drug transaction going down.”

Martin said his agency is down four officers, in part because of a national shortage of police officers that makes it hard to attract recruits to a town where police operate under a magnifying glass. “This is a very tough town to police,” he said.

“The Brattleboro Police Department has more checks and balances in everything we do” than any other law enforcement agency in the state, Martin said. “There is also paranoia about doing anything law-enforcement related because we know for sure there will be complaints with how we do things.”

Martin sees ALANA as a conduit for complaints, and says the media’s drumbeat of coverage hasn’t helped.

Reed rebuffs those charges, and said the reason more complaints weren’t filed before establishment of the CPCC was out of fear of retaliation. “If you remove that, create an environment where people feel their complaint is going to be heard in an open and transparent and accountable way, then they’re going to step forward,” Reed said. “Keep in mind that John and I decided two years ago that we would hold complaint forms here [at ALANA]. We have a responsibility to let people know, as part of our initiative in helping people know and defend their civil rights, that this is how you go about doing it.”

Martin said he has taken steps to mediate the Clark-Canal conflict, asking the U.S. Justice Department’s Civil Rights division to hold a meeting among the parties involved. But as the chief sees it, there is no reason to bring charges against Canon. “In bringing in the tapes, he certainly became very aggressive at pursuing video footage that demonstrated his beliefs,” Martin told the Vermont Guardian. “But he didn’t break any laws. He took video only of things that were in the public’s view, which is perfectly legal, either by us or by any citizen, and would from time to time present us with those tapes.”

But one civil liberties expert said it’s not so clear. “If police are regularly receiving tapes that a civilian is making, it becomes state action,” said Ben Skotch, a constitutional law expert and former head of the Vermont American Civil Liberties Union.

“In principle, the police are making use of the fruits of this person’s efforts,” which could make the videographer an agent of the state, said Skotch, who noted that he does not speak on behalf of the ACLU.

“I like to think that in our society the police should not be simply free to go and videotape and hope they can catch somebody, because we don’t have a police society,” he said. “And even assuming they are within their rights by taping, they certainly can’t target neighborhoods by race.”

This is the first in a series of articles examining policing powers in Vermont.