Olivia Rodrigo made waves at this year's Grammy Awards and took home a handful of awards. That might make you forget how young she is, but being so young, she only recently broke word that she moved out from her family home and is now living in her very own apartment. In this video, we'll check out what we know about Olivia's home life. In these videos, we don't reveal any addresses and even though I've done a house tour of my own place, please do not show up at any private residences because it's not safe for anyone. Olivia Rodrigo is an American singer and actress who made a name for herself on a number of Disney TV series before becoming a best-selling musician. Her debut album Sour was released in May of 2021 and it would include some gigantic hits and now that she's reigning over the top of the charts, Olivia has accomplished the childhood dream that she set for herself way back at the beginning of her journey when she was first taking vocal lessons at just five years old. Influenced by her parents every step along the way, Olivia would eventually put her hopes for music career on hold while she broke into the entertainment industry through the world of acting. Every job I was in like first grade or something and the only thing I had to do was like turn around and go, Mom, I don't know if I'm kind of healthy. There's like this is a lot of work and here I am. Before she knew it, Olivia was co-starring with Jake Paul in the Disney series Bizarre of Arc for its entire run. But over the course of 2020 in the worldwide pandemic, Olivia would return to her original ambitions of becoming a pop music singer and in the span of only one year, she'd accomplish them wildly. Her very first original single Driver's License would jump to the top of the Billboard charts upon its release in January of 2021. By the end of the year, Spotify was recognizing the song as the most streamed single of 2021. But like I said, with all of these accomplishments, it can be easy to forget that Olivia is still just a young girl and only 19. In fact, she recently graduated from high school last June. And if she wasn't a celebrity, she'd be off somewhere finishing up her first year at university or college. But the lifestyle that accompanies fame is unique and sometimes complicated. Now, Olivia must navigate the world of adulthood on her own first step, getting her own apartment. You turned 18 that you'd you'd move out. What's happening? I am moved out. Currently, you're talking to me in my very own apartment. Hey, guys, it's Kara back with another exclusive house to her here in Famous Entertainment. And in this one, we're checking out Olivia Rodrigo's Bachelor of Pad. Don't forget to like, subscribe, and hit me up on Instagram to chat. And now let's get into this video. Olivia grew up in the tourist and resort destination of the city of Temecula, which is technically part of the Greater Los Angeles area. Born to parents Ronald and Sophia Rodrigo, Olivia's father is a Filipino American while her mother, Sophia, is of Irish and German descent. Ronald spends his days working as a therapist and Sophia is a teacher. As an only child in the Rodrigo household, it was always just Olivia and her parents. I want a pet snake, but Olivia was too young to really remember that. Even if Stripes was basically her roommate, she told GQ, they kept it in my bedroom when I was three years old. I'm like, you kept an effing snake in my bedroom. When she wasn't hanging out with cold blooded reptiles, Olivia would spend quality time with members of her extended family. In fact, when talking about what her family has meant to her since day one, my heritage is part of who I am. I'm part Filipino and my dad's side of the family. My Filipino heritage comes from my great-grandfather. He came on about from the Philippines when he was just a teenager. Can you imagine moving to a whole new country all by herself? As she grew older, Olivia would only grow closer and closer to her family members. Today, she continues to be pen pals with her great-grandmother and everything she knows how to do in the kitchen, she says she learned from her great-grandfather. Apparently, he's the one who taught her how to cook. Some traditions that have carried over into my generation are we actually make Filipino food and so we make lumpias, which are kind of like Filipino egg rolls and really yummy. Of course, growing up with so much talent isn't always fun and game. It's a lot of hard work too. And Olivia's parents always pushed her to be the greatest version of herself she could possibly be while at home. In fact, rather than send Olivia off to school like normal kids, she was homeschooled for most of her life. While speaking with Glamour magazine about how the pandemic had affected her, Olivia would provide some insight into her daily routine when she responded with, You know what? I am a homeschool kid. So I'm used to being in my house, my laptop, but with my parents. So I've kind of been preparing for this moment for a while and I feel very fortunate to be able to state that I'm in a really good place. I'm catching up on my schoolwork and I challenged myself before quarantine started to write a song every day. And I haven't missed a day yet. Does that sound like a lot of pressure? Of course it does. But thanks to the fact that Olivia's parents have been placing a certain level of expectation on their young daughter, since she first started taking piano lessons at the age of nine, Olivia was ready to deliver. In fact, these days, Olivia says her mom is the very person she plays all of her original musical compositions for, including the song that would come to change her life, Driver's License. Which one would you pick and why? Oh my God, that's so difficult. I really love Driver's License. After the release of that single and accomplishing the performance of her wildest dreams, Olivia knew that it was time for a change. So in the early part of 2021, she finally struck out on her own and left behind her BFFs, otherwise known as her parents, to move out on her own. Or did she? While speaking with GQ during an episode of their web series, Actually Me, Olivia would let it slip that she was finally out there in the world living on her own. So what's her new apartment like? Well, as you might imagine, Olivia's kept the details of her bachelorette pad to a minimum. But while speaking with some folks over at Serious XM, she did give everyone a little taste of her space. What's the coolest thing in your new apartment? Oh my gosh, this really beautiful painting when my album came out. I was always telling him which I loved the art that was in the Interscope Studio. Okay, maybe not like a visual taste, but hey, at least now you know that she's got some funky artwork from the folks over at Interscope Records hanging on her walls. Speaking of things on her walls, Olivia also has one very unique piece of memorabilia from her career framed and hanging in a place of honor. An inspirational tweet from Cardi B. Cardi's original tweet to Olivia read, you're doing so good for your age.  After reading that piece of advice, Olivia bawled her eyes out. She told GQ. I literally saw it and cried. I was like, thanks Cardi, I'm not going to listen to Bolsh. Outside of that meaningful decor item, there's also her favorite room.  You have a favorite room? My bedroom always. I have all my bed and I just write in here and just like, I don't know, it's my favorite place ever. Hey, what better place to write if you teared your gris from than the comfort of your own mattress, right? That's what beds are primarily for, right? Wait, they're not? But here's the other thing with Olivia's big move. She hasn't quite fully committed to it yet. During that same interview, she would admit that even though she's already moved out, her parents come and stay with her, like all the time. We're on Rigo currently living with her parents. Technically I'm not living with my parents. She'd clarify things that'll further when she spoke with the Guardian a little bit later that year-end mentioned. It's like a soft move out. My parents are there a lot of the time, but I love being alone and I love my own solitude. The only problem, Olivia's not exactly great at a few other important things, like eating and cleaning. She finished by telling GQ, I love living alone. I just don't know how to take care of myself though. I don't know what to buy from the grocery store or how to clean up after myself. It's been a learning experience. I'm sure it has. Then again, Olivia is still only 19. As for what else Olivia likes to do now that she has her own place, well apparently she's invited her good friend, Iris Apatow, to live with her. And now these two, they get together regularly in their new place for a little Sex in the City marathons. Well that I can definitely relate to. All right guys, that's gonna bring this latest house tour to a close. What did you all think of Olivia Rodrigo's living situation? I might not have been able to take you too far inside of the pop star's new place just yet, but she's still breaking it. Give her a few more years and maybe a few more zip codes and I'm sure she'll be showing off more of her home before long. And we'll be reporting on it. Be sure to drop a comment down below and don't forget to like and subscribe to Famous Entertainment if you haven't yet. Thanks for watching. Find me on Instagram if you'd like to chat and I'll catch you all next time. Bye.


Personal Finance PowerPoint Presentation, buying a home remotely. Get ready to get financially fit by practicing personal finance. Remember when we're thinking about our financing decisions, we can break them out into the short-term decisions, the long-term decisions, short-term decisions being those ones where we're going to train our gut to trust our gut using things like tinkering, trial and error so we can hone down our habits so we can make more decisions by good habit. When we're looking at the long-term decisions such as the purchasing of a home, one of the longest term decisions for most individuals, we want to put down a more formal process because we're not usually as good as human beings to make decisions that are longer timeframes out into the future and because we can't tinker, we can't use the same kind of trial and error method. We have to use the adage of measure twice, cut once in order to make our decision-making process. So here's the process that you might think about going through when we're going through the home purchase. We've got number one, determine the home ownership need. Why do I need the home? What's the purpose of the home? Is it more of a financing need or is it more of a personal need? Am I using the home for a home for a long period of time or is there more of a financial condition that's driving my decision-making process? So number two, find and evaluate a property to purchase. So clearly we're going to be looking at the properties and where we're going to be purchasing them. We're going to compare the prices of the property to our budget. We're going to obtain financing at that point and then close the purchase transaction. That's the general process. So we're going to be looking at buying a home remotely. A step-by-step guide, most of this information can be found at Investopedia, which you can find online and you can look at more references, resources, continuing your research from there. This is by Gene Fulger, updated July 31st, 2021. So we've got the online or remote purchasing resources. This is something that's of course fairly new and is becoming more and more applicable as time goes on, as the resources and applications are improved. The online tools are, even if you're not purchasing completely remotely, are going to be tools that are really nice and useful when going through the home purchasing process. Buying a home remotely is becoming increasingly common these days. It has been standard practice for some time in the real estate world for sellers to skip the home closing by presigning paperwork and having sale proceeds wired directly to a bank account. But now the entire process can be done remotely by buyers as well as sellers. Why buy a home remotely, you might ask. During this point in time we're dealing with the coronavirus and the aftermath of the coronavirus. Clearly that is pushing more and more businesses, including in the real estate area, to push as much as possible into an online platform. For most businesses, including real estate, many things were going that way anyways. We had more applications, more tools on the online area, which were great, but clearly that process has been heightened, the speed at which it has been going increased due to the coronavirus. So right now the novel coronavirus is upending the way home sales are conducted from canceled open houses to video tours taking the place of in-person home showings. So that's one of the things that in-person or the video tours is one area where you can kind of see that increase, that step-up, meaning we're having these tools where you can kind of compare different properties, have pictures of different properties, have side-by-side comparisons with a lot of these kind of tools that are online.  But you often then still have people that we're going to go check out the home and take the actual physical tour. More and more you got that tour aspect that can possibly even be done in a remote kind of situation. As people avoid close contact to keep from spreading the virus, buyers remotely make more sense. So in more normal times, people who buy remotely often do so to purchase a second home or vacation home. So it used to be in the past, you might think, if you're going to purchase remotely, maybe it's for a second home type of purchases. Typically they are from out of state and have jobs and other obligations that prevent them from spreading a lot of time on the home-buying process. So clearly they're trying to save time with the remote purchase. That said, by Todd Catterback, a residential broker associate with Beverly Hanks and associate Realtors. Financing can be a factor. If a parent is buying a home for an adult child, they may decide to buy remotely, especially if they live out of state. So obviously if you're purchasing something for a child and the child is moving out of state, it's going to be more difficult for you to go take the tour out of state. That might be a remote purchase, says Catterback. Quote, in these cases, the parent often buys the house site unseen, handles all the paperwork and closings remotely, making an all cash purchase end quote. Real estate investors may also choose to buy homes remotely. Most real estate investors follow the 1% rule, which states that the monthly rent earned on a property should exceed that property's monthly mortgage payments. So the investor at least breaks even on the property. So if you're in an investment type of situation, you might be trying to be driven more on how much investment or rent you might get from the place. And this is a factor that you might be able to get just by the location of the place. So you might be more content with purchasing, for example, on a remote type of purchase situation. It's easier to find properties that follow the 1% rule in certain markets, which may be located in significant distance from the investor's home base. As a result, buying a house remotely can be an attractive time saving option. So that allows you to basically invest possibly in different states or different areas, which could be great. I mean, for investing in real estate, usually, if you're going to actually physically invest in the actual real estate itself, it used to be more difficult. You're probably going to have real estate around your local area, but it would be nice if you can expand your investment outside of that local area so that you have a more diverse investment in real estate, which is becoming easier to do with some of these kind of online tools as well. Whatever your reason for buying remotely, there are certain steps you can take to ensure the process goes as smoothly as possible. Find the right real estate agent. So clearly, you're going to need an agent. You're going to want an agent that is experienced with this kind of transactions that you're going to be dealing with and the way that they're going to be put in place. You will depend on your real estate agent to handle nearly the entire home buying process. So it's critical that you take the time and make the effort to find a good fit. Homebuying involves a lot of moving parts. It says, cat or back, quote, it's important to find a good personality match between the client and the agent. So clearly, if you're going to be working with someone for a good deal of time, you want to make sure that you have a good working relationship with that individual or at least think that you can have a good working relationship with them. An interview is helpful, whether by phone or video, and it's always a good idea to get references to see what other buyers have to say. So clearly, you want to do some research when you're looking into an agent, talk to them by phone or by online conference, get some background check on them if possible. Ask about experience when you speak with a potential agent. Cat or a back recommends asking from the start, quote, how often have you done this process remotely? So if you're clearly focusing in on remote transactions that might not be the expertise of many agents, you want to be upfront in terms of what you want from them so that everybody knows what is expected going forward. Experience matters and agents who work frequently with remote buyers are more likely to understand how it works, negotiate favorably, and find suitable properties for the buyer. The agent should also be able to advise on a local lender, quote, a non-local lender is likely to use a non-local appraiser, which can be the death nail in unique markets like Asheville. The agent should also be able to advise on a local lender, quote, a non-local lender is likely to use a non-local appraiser, which can be the death nail in unique markets like Asheville, quote, says Cat or a back. So you could have circumstances that are different from one location to the other, which could be costly. So you want to make sure that whoever you are dealing with is able to circumvent or navigate through those items as well as the agent. Ask about availability. Many real estate agents work odd or port time hours, which can be particularly difficult for remote buyers. Your agent will serve as your proxy, so they need to be available during regular business hours to handle a variety of tasks in the home buying process, including home inspection. If you're dealing with an agent, are they like a part-time agent? Is this a side job for them? How much availability do they have in the process, quote? I attend all home inspections, but with an out-of-town client, it's critical, quote, says Cat or a back, quote. In a world where home inspections take place between nine and five, it's going to be very difficult for an agent to attend your home inspection if they have another job, end quote. So you got to be making sure that when you're talking that you're picking someone up that's going to be able to suit your needs. If they're doing it as a side job, it might be more difficult, of course, for them to do so. Share your wish list. Once you have an agent, share your wish list so the agent can help you find the perfect property. The more refined your list, the quicker the home search may go to a point.  If you have too many requests, it will likely slow down the process. So obviously we can, you know, go overboard with your requests and whatnot and that could slow things down. Stick to the things that really matter, size, location, house style, walk-in closet and leave out the minor details that would be easy to fix or update in any home. I would like the den to be painted green or something like that. It's probably a little too detailed. You can paint it green. Maybe afterwards let's stick down to the big things that really matter in the home purchasing process. And if there are any deal breakers, features you absolutely could not live without, then you want to make sure you're laying those out, let them know. Let your agent know early on so they don't waste time looking at the wrong property. So if they're looking at properties and you're saying, well, I can't do that because it doesn't have a patio. That's like a deal breaker. Well, you didn't tell me it was a deal. You want to lay that out up front. Quote, if you're an agent, you have to take the bold step to call your client and tell them you've found the perfect property for them, says a cat or a back. As a buyer, you need to trust that your agent knows exactly what you're looking for at home. Quote, a home could look perfect on the internet, but a good agent will be able to say, no, that's not the home it's home for you because it sits next to an active railroad track or something like that. So clearly if you're looking on a home remotely, you don't have the capacity to actually, you know, do the walkthrough. You're not going to be picking up things that the person on the ground can be picking up such as, well, yeah, something over here. And again, you might be able to pick up some of that kind of stuff online. You might be able to see that it's next to a railroad track just by looking, you know, by researching it online, but you know, you get a much better look and feel, of course, if you're on the ground looking at a piece of property than if you are looking at it remotely. So use the due diligence period. Once a home is under contract, there's time to review title documents and deed restrictions, as well to conduct inspections, financing and bank appraisals before closing. In some states, including North Carolina, there's an official due diligence period during which buyers conduct their due diligence and decide if they want to go through with the home purchase. This may not apply if the home is in, is a new construction. The buyer pays a non-refundable due diligence fee, typically between $500 and $2,000, which typically compensates the seller for taking the home off the market and gives the buyer time to make a decision. The buyer also makes an earnest money deposit equal to about 2% to 3% of the purchase price or more in fast-moving markets. Both the due diligence fee and earnest money deposits are negotiable between the buyer and seller. The buyer can terminate the contract for quote, any or no reason in quote, or some other language during the due diligence period and forfeit only the due diligence fee. If the buyer backs out after the due diligence period they will forfeit both the due diligence fee and the earnest money as only the due diligence fee is forfeited if the buyer terminates the contract during the due diligence period. This can open up an interesting opportunity for remote buyers. It can be used as a tool to get a house under contract while giving an easy out to terminate the contract with limited financial risk. In the case of buying remotely it gives the buyer a window of time to view the property in person before making any financial decision, making any final decision. Close remotely, so the closing process remotely, the e-sign act of 2000 makes your electronic signature just as valid as if you sign the documents in person. So this is another thing that really opened up a lot of the online kind of business process, these kind of e-signatures that are in place so now we can kind of seal the deal in a remote fashion a little bit more easily, a lot more easily than before. In addition advances in technology have made remote closing routine for sellers and very feasible for buyers.  You'll sign them using an electronic signature system which usually sends the signed forms back to the appropriate party. So if you've ever used these electronic signature systems then they're pretty nice at least from a logistics standpoint because they can go through multiple people to get the signature and then send it back to whoever needs to sign it. If it needs to go to multiple people to sign it then it can follow that pattern with an electronic signature program. So quote, attorneys still require physical signature so your agent will work with the closing attorney and FedEx all the necessary documents to you ahead of the closing says cater a back so you might still have some physical signatures necessary for the agent, for the agent. So the quote, the agent then goes to the closing table with the closing documents without the buyer and the funds are wired to complete the transaction. The bottom line, buying a home remotely can be a good option for second home buyers, parents who want to buy homes for their children and out of state real-estate investors. In many ways the process is the same as buying a home in person however you will depend even more on your real-estate agent to find the right home be present for the inspections guide you through the paperwork and attend the closing. So clearly again there's some very nice pros and cons there because you got these circumstances that you can make the purchase under especially this kind of out of state purchasing or investing if you're purchasing something out of state or something like that might be able to increase the diversity but of course the fact you can't do everything remotely so you do have to rely on the agent you would think to make some of those decisions on the ground or at least give you that second look as someone that is looking up physically looking at as such finding the right agent one who has experience with remote transactions is one of the most important steps you can take when buying a house remotely.


My first deployment was to Iraq. I was a combat engineer. And instead of sending a dog into a building to search for booby traps, the infantry team just ran inside and got blown up. We had to pick up chunks of wall to recover the bodies of three soldiers that went in there. I still have that image in front of me. But after that, I didn't want to do anything else. I worked a dog. What we're training here are combat dog teams. We're trying to train them to the best of our abilities to be able to go out and to support conventional or unconventional military. My biggest fear would be not finding something, and it's right there. And then find out that someone was on that same route, that same area, and got killed. Because I've been blown up. I've seen people blown up. I've seen people die from them. So I have no hesitations going out to finite indies whatsoever. Gotcha! Is he hit? Bombs' death surrounds them. And in the middle of this is this powerful bond. What we've got is the militarization of love. That friendship, that bond in his eyes, was more than I could ever ask for. Right then I knew that dog will give his life for me. Sergeant Radlon, welcome back. It's good to have the anti-dog back with you. Imagine the trauma that these dogs feel. They come home and they're ripped apart from the one stable being in their lives.  Well, you will never forget your first dog or your last. You're going to remember all of them.


This study investigated the correlation between thyroid-stimulating hormone, TSH, levels and homocysteine, total cholesterol, and low-density lipoprotein, LDL, levels in hypothyroid patients. The results showed that TSH levels are significantly higher in hypothyroid patients compared to healthy individuals. Additionally, there was a positive correlation between TSH levels and homocysteine, total cholesterol, and LDL levels. These findings suggest that hypothyroidism may lead to increased levels of homocysteine, total cholesterol, and LDL, which could contribute to the development of atherosclerotic diseases. This article was authored by Aximalic, Ateasamon, Causer-Azar, and others.


When it comes to browsers, I'm pretty open-minded as long as your browser works I don't truly care whether or not it's proprietary open source. I would prefer That it was open source, but as long as it works and it provides cool features. I Might use it, you know right now. I'm on Firefox again, but I've in the past. I've used Microsoft Edge I've used Google Chrome in the past. I've used cute browser. I've used all the browsers As long as your browser works and like I said it provides cool features I'm okay with it. It has no impact on my life whatsoever if your browser is proprietary or Not and when it comes to distros choosing what browser to put in their isos That decision doesn't affect me either because I can always go use a different distro or I can use that distro uninstall the browser that they installed and then Install the browser that I want. It's very easy This past week Manjaro Cinnamon Community Edition, which is a mouthful of a name Announced that they were switching from Firefox to Vivaldi So they're moving from an open-source browser to a proprietary browser And I was going to make a video about this because the Fox community has kind of lost their minds when it comes to this kind of stuff They get very preachy when someone makes a decision or a choice That they don't agree with the first community is very lovable in that way I guess is one nice way to put it and that's the video I was going to make but then I found a blog post from Vivaldi itself that just It pissed me off because I don't like hypocrites not even a little bit and this article is just so hypocritical It just seriously fried my brain and it kept me from defending the choice of Manjaro to switch from Firefox to Vivaldi because at this point I'm on the side of all the rest of the floss bros thinking this is a horrible idea because I don't like these people anymore So let's go ahead and go through the article that pissed me off so much Now I will say that I think that this article has been published before on their blog that they've just republished it I seem to remember in the back of my mind that I've read this before. It's very very familiar, but They have updated it on their site. So It's not as if it's not fresh news. So let's go ahead and take a look at it So I'm not gonna put the camera on while I'm here because I want to make sure everybody can read all the text and I will link this in the video description below so that you can read it From top to bottom if you want because I'm not going to read this whole thing verbatum Most of it doesn't matter, but some of it is just kind of it's just not good So it starts out about how they've always getting questions about why Vivaldi is not open source and Then they go on to say that the Vivaldi is actually mostly open source They claim that 95% of their code is open source This comes across a little bit as tooting their own horn when 92% of that Work wasn't from them to begin with 92% of their code comes from someone else and That's okay. That's the way false works a lot of the time You know when you fork a project you take some of one else's code and then add on top of it That's the way open source software works a lot of the time. So there's nothing wrong with it It just this feels like they're advertising the fact that oh we we have the vast majority of our Source code published online for you to see when the vast majority of that source code wasn't their work to begin with But this isn't the part that pisses me off.  You've built another chromium browser with five percent of proprietary nonsense stacked on top of it I Don't care. How cool the UI is It is still proprietary on top of it. It's they even admit it right They say right here five percent of for our UI closed source code So the five percent of their code is closed source and it all has to do with UI in some security features Which they talk about later, but let's just move on it's the next part that just makes me mad because this section here talks about One of the reasons why they don't want to make Vivaldi open source is because they're worried someone else will come around and forked their browser and make something different become a competitor and not give them any credit or They will that new product will stain their the Vivaldi's team's reputation and Will become a huge player in the browser space and it's I'm just gonna read it because It's it's fascinating and also oddly just dumb because Well, I'll talk about it later. Okay after I'm done reading I'll explain to you why I think it's just the dumbest thing I've ever read So what makes Vivaldi Vivaldi if the Vivaldi browser is so close to being released under a unified open source license Why haven't we taken that leap? It comes down to protecting the heart and soul of our browser for its Vivaldi's UI that truly makes the browser unique In terms of code, it is our most valuable asset We don't publish it under an open source license and only release obfuscated versions of it The latter is there to improve performance But also to serve as a first line of defense Otherwise other parties could take the code and build an equivalent browser essentially a fork more easily But why fear forks in the first place? We get it from an open source perspective forks are pretty much the point you fork someone else's work Make something new and cool out of it. You get credit for your addition the project you fork from gets the credit for being that project and Maybe they'll take in a your addition and everybody is happy Everyone is happy But the way we see it Vivaldi is more than just its code It is our brand with associated trademarks We have to protect this means any fork needs to be branded as a different product and this new product then would Become an immediate competitor without putting any significant technical work to reach that status Now when it comes to large projects that have been around for ages in our household names people might not even Notice the fork, but with Vivaldi's relatively smaller footprint We could be easier to overshadow making our brand more vulnerable and not just in terms of revenue our ethical identity Also comes into play Now I'm gonna just stop there the rest of it talks about how morals and ethics and stuff again. That's whatever Let's just talk about the elephant in the room here Vivaldi as Admitted in the previous paragraphs gets 92% of their work from a project that they themselves forked Yes, they themselves have forked a project chromium to build their product and Their problem with open sourcing their project is that somebody else might come across and do what they have already done and Make it better or you make a competitor. I mean it's just so so hypocritical and We I mean we can ignore that part, but I don't think we should it's just so so weird It's infuriating how hypocritical that is now if you want to be proprietary Be proprietary. It's okay. Just say we want to protect our patents and our UI and we don't want anybody else to steal them Basically saying the same thing, but it's also it's it's being said without being so Too faced about it, I guess I would say I don't even know if that's the right way to put it It doesn't I mean it's just I'm so infuriated by it that I can't even talk.  I mean That's I mean That's so dumb, right, but let's move past it. Let's Matt just take a breath. It's okay Let's talk a little bit about the fact that they think so much of their browser that they expect someone to come through and take it and rebrand it and sell the exact same browser and Somehow become an overnight competitor. That's actually going to take their market short share I mean, I suppose that's possible to happen But it seems relatively unlikely given that Vivaldi has such a small market share to begin with I doubt that someone who comes through and forks it is going to take any of that stuff without putting some kind of technical effort into it and that's the thing They say that Where was it and This new product would then become an immediate competitor without putting any significant technical work in to reach that status No, if somebody comes across comes around and let's just say Vivaldi is open source and somebody forks it and puts it out There as Bob's browser the the likelihood of people using Bob's browser if it's identical to Vivaldi is slim to none Because it's just Vivaldi. They're going to use the mother ship It's almost guaranteed if it's exactly the same and if it's not exactly the same Let's say Bob has put a lot of effort into making the Vivaldi better like say he Makes it faster for example. I don't know something like that. Then he's put some technical effort into it and He deserves to be a competitor So this whole thing doesn't make any sense whatsoever Because there's so little of a chance of a fork actually becoming a significant competitor to such a small project It doesn't make any sense. It just feels overly paranoid and I don't understand it Now like I said, I don't care that the proprietary I don't it doesn't whatever, you know be proprietary if you want to be proprietary Chances are you're just going to drive a lot of people away who want to use a false browser But those people were using Firefox to begin with they weren't going to use a chromium-based browser anyways You're not gonna lose many customers by not being open source You're gonna get a lot of weird press when Open source people Stir up a fuss that's gonna happen from time to time Which was why I think that that this this blog post has been republished But whatever it doesn't matter what matters to me is being honest about why you're proprietary being forthcoming because the reason why the volley is proprietary is because they want to protect their patents if they have patents or they want to protect their UI and That's a reasonable reason to be proprietary, I suppose even if having your tabs on the bottom and your your tabs on the side isn't necessarily the most groundbreaking piece of UI design I've ever seen in my life Whatever you can be proprietary. It doesn't matter. Just be honest about it Don't go through and say we have forked a project called chromium and we've put a new UI on it Which that part is closed source But we won't open source that because we're worried about forks, but even though we are Relying on a fork of a fork. It's just It's so weird and it's so infuriating and it's just entirely hypocritical. I Don't like the way they put it. Let's just put it that way. So yeah My whole defense of men jarrow switching away from Firefox to go to the volley just kind of went up in flames when I saw this saw this post Because like I said, I don't like hypocrites. I don't like them at all and It just has totally changed my mind on the volley because it comes across as just so tone death. It's just so bad so Don't use the ball because not because it's proprietary but because they don't want you to fork their software even though they've they're standing on the shoulders of another fork and It just is so weird. Anyways, that is it for this video I apologize that I got so infuriated that I lost all my words there for quite a while this is like my fourth try at doing this video because Every time I read that one that that one section I was like, what is wrong with you people? It's just so weird. Anyways, you can follow me on Twitter at the linuxcast You can support me on patreon at patreon.com slash linuxcast before I go. I'd like to take a moment to thank my current patrons Devon Chris East Coast Webgent to his fun to Marcus Magland Sven Jackson knife tool Joshua Lee Mitchell Arch Center American camp Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time


Burlington, he grew up in Underhill, right, John? Basically, his mother and father were professors, retired professors at UVM, Spanish professors, and they brought him up here in Underhill, Vermont. But he also spent a lot of time in Puerto Rico because Joanne, his mother, it was born there and father and grew up there as well. He is a graduate of Harvard University, both undergraduate and also graduate degree from Harvard. He lived in California for a while. He came, then he moved to New York. He served in the New York Police Department. He also worked for Newsweek, which I find really interesting. I thought, you know, that would be at least as interesting I would think of being police chief. He, in November of 2016, he left New York City for the private sector. He worked with Bill Bratton's chief of staff. He came to Vermont in, I guess, about 2016, or when did you come to Vermont? 18, I moved, I took the job here as the deputy chief of operations in October of 2018. Okay, and that was when chief Del Poso was the chief of police, is that correct? That's correct. And when he came here to this, to back to Burlington, he took a big pay cut because he wanted to be in Vermont so badly and who could blame him after being in New York? Anyway, so he's with us tonight to talk a little bit about what it's like to be a police chief at this important moment. And then we will ask, have questions for him after that. And we would ask that those questions we put into chat. If somebody wants to ask me how to do that, maybe they could ask somebody else. But anyway, the question should come through the chat and then I will read those questions to the chief. Okay, so here we are, John. So what do you have to say? Where are your parents by the way? I thought they were parents. One, I see one, I see my mother. He's a friend of theirs who's staying with them. So I do see, I see one in the dark there. And I'm very, very gratified to see a number of dear friends from here. It's good to see you, Janet. And I'm just glad to see you. And I think that it is, I'm very, very happy to be here. Really glad that you've given me the opportunity to come by and speak. I actually don't have a lot to say myself. If I have one flaw, it's that I can go on. So I'm gonna try to keep it short and actually just allow some of these questions to come out. But I'll fill in a little bit to lay out where we are. And if the idea is to discuss where a police chief is right now in America, but also specifically in Burlington, I'll sort of keep myself to that. Everything that Sandy pointed out is true. I was born here in Vermont. I grew up here in Vermont. I was raised by two parents who were part of UVM. I left Vermont for college and didn't really come back aside from coming home and painting my parents' house so that they could have an excuse to give me enough money to go someplace else. And I went to California, spent several years there, moved to New York City to be with the woman who is now my wife, did work at Newsweek for a while. It was a good experience. It was during the 2004 elections and during the ramp up of the Iraq war. I wasn't a great journalist though and really didn't want that as a career. Was looking for something that I thought would have meaning. My younger brother is a neurosurgeon in Florida and he has a job where every moment is of consequence. And when he made a mistake or if he were to make a mistake, it has a great import. And I wanted a job like that and Newsweek to me didn't feel like that because I wasn't a good journalist. I think good journalists have a lot of impact and have a lot of ability to have lives of great import but I wanted something different. And I saw a, I read a book by a Harvard graduate who became a police officer. And that dispelled for me some misconceptions I had about whether or not I would be wasting my degree by taking on a job like that. I also was, I watched a mini series on HBO called Band of Brothers, which happened right around the time of 9-Eleven and 9-Eleven was a huge catalyst for me as well. And I wanted to know whether or not I had in me what I saw those people having in them through that experience. And last but not least, there was an article by Malcolm Gladwell in an issue, excuse me, of The New Yorker in which he talked about Myers-Briggs tests or MBTI tests, those binary question tests that you answer a 600, 700 questions yes or no, yes or no.  And that the purpose of his article was to say, no, that's not the case. To do that, you have to go live life. And I didn't feel I was living life. I left Los Angeles because it wasn't an examined life and it wasn't contributory. I tried to find that contribution in publishing and didn't. And then I did in policing. I joined the New York City Police Department. I was hired ridiculously quickly. I applied in October and was hired by January, which just never happens in that agency. They have year-long wait periods, multi-year wait periods. And I really enjoyed it. I ended up in working in housing projects in the Bronx, very intense work and very, very fulfilling. I was promoted to detective but then the sergeant and then finally I was an assistant commissioner there under Bill Bratton during his second tenure with the NYPD. And when he retired for the second time, he convinced me to go to the private sector with him. And I did and I wasn't fulfilled by it. And I wanted to be back in public service. And I also wanted to come home. I'd always been searching for a way to come home. My wife also loved Vermont. She's from Texas, but she lived here. My parents very graciously let us live with them for a year while I was in graduate school at Harvard. And so they'd moved in with my folks because it was an easier commute from Boston to Burlington than it was from Boston to New York. She knew the state. We both wanted to be here. When the opportunity came to apply for the job in Burlington, I leapt at it. And I did, I took a big pay cut to take that job but it was worth it. And I came aboard an agency that was, it was really, I think, moving in the right direction. I think Chief Del Poso was doing amazing things with this agency and Mayor Weinberger were doing amazing things with regard to the opioid epidemic, with regard to training issues. They overcame some real challenges and tragedies and built from those and developed a capacity for interacting with people who are in emotional distress that is, they were pilot for a national program that has shown great, great effect. They built some tools for that. A lot of it wasn't trickling into the officer corps, however. And so a good portion of what I was brought aboard to do was try to connect some of these achievements with the officers and to try to make certain that the officers felt supported and integrated into these changes that Chief Del Poso was making. And so that was what I preoccupied myself with for most of the time or rather occupied myself with for the first year or so of my tenure and made good inroads in that. And then I think anybody in Burlington knows what happened in December of 2019. And there was turmoil at the top of the agency. I led the agency for a month in December into early January, Chief Jennifer Morrison who had been with the Burlington Police Department for 20-something years and then had been in Colchester as the head of that agency for five years, agreed to come back to policing after having retired and led the Burlington Police Department for the first six months of 2020. But it was a really great partnership. I enjoyed so much working for her and learning from her. And then she left for a number of reasons. It was prearranged that she would leave in early June. And that coincided of course with a national tragedy. And the murder of George Floyd. The day that George Floyd was murdered, we were actually in Burlington facilitating and I personally planned with the Vermont National Guard and others the distribution, the largest food distribution that we'd ever done. And I believe have ever done in Burlington's history. I arranged to shut down the belt line and had the distribution there underneath the overpass from the North Avenue entrance. And we worked to do that. That was what I was spent May 25th doing. And then a horrible, horrible thing, a crime happened in Minneapolis. And that just changed everything. We went from dealing with the pandemic in a way again that was Jennifer Morrison and I were very clear about not wanting to do what became a problem for many other localities, which was turn police into an enforcement arm for that pandemic. And I think that we're lucky in Burlington that we didn't have to. We had a polity that was participatory in its own protection. And so that was a lot of peace. And so we were able to say that we are going to encourage and engage and educate but not enforce. That was a real positive. And much of that was dispelled by what happened in Minneapolis and then an understandable and impassioned movement here that did lead to a funding issue and a decision by the city council to require a 30% reduction in the Burlington Police Department through attrition. Thankfully, I initially believed that it was going to be through layoffs. I was very, very frightened of that opportunity. I dreaded the idea of laying off officers. I was in the chief's position by that point and laying off officers would have had really negative repercussions. Seniority rules by union rules, we would have had to lay off some of our most promising officers. But that didn't happen. It went to attrition instead. And that attrition has happened over the past year, I think faster than even I prognosticated. And I did warn that that's where we were going to be. And so now we find ourselves in a position where our headcount is drastically diminishing where our call volume is picking up again after a great depression in 2020. Overall incident volume in 2020 dropped about 17%. Our priority one calls, the most important calls, the calls that have the most impact on public safety went up 4% in 2020. So even as everything else plummeted, those rose. And now we are seeing and the first several months of 2021, we're also very depressed that's gone down but they're coming up again. And the complicated types of incidents are coming up a great deal. We had a few weekends ago two shooting incidents, two gunfire incidents. There's a difference between gunfire, which doesn't strike anyone and a shooting, which does. So these weren't shootings. We're fortunate that no one was struck, but they were gunfire in the city. They're the fourth and fifth gunfire incidents of 2021. Previous years had an average of two per year. But in 2020, we saw a dozen. And so we are seeing real changes in the city. They are driven by the pandemic. They are driven by things that are happening at the national scale. They are driven by a diminishment of police presence, I believe, I firmly believe and can find studies for you that say that police presence or police does equal reduced crime. And the thing about any of these stats is that people will have studies on both sides of the equation. They can talk about it from both sides. And most statistics can be argued from both sides too. In the Burlington Police Department, we do have racial disparities in our enforcement. We have racial disparities that's in traffic enforcement and in arrests and in use of force. And those are things that we have to confront. The presence of those gave credence to the passions that were evoked in last June's budget discussions. And so how we address those going forward, how we address the fact that we are losing officers left and right. And that's not merely in Burlington where we can't hire to replace by Fiat. It's everywhere where they can't hire to replace because no one will take the job. There is a massive recruitment and retention problem across the country. It's felt very keenly in the state. It's obviously felt keenly for us. That's a challenge for police chiefs in this modern era. Racial equity is a massive problem for police chiefs in this modern era. And one of the frustrations I think many police chiefs feel is that while we talk about systemic racism and acknowledge that it exists, there is this sense that the impacts of it, the outcomes of it, the effects of it when it comes to policing are the result of the police or of something that's happening in the police profession as opposed to the idea that it's everywhere and that there are many, many, many upstream factors that contribute to what we end up encountering at a police level. And so how we wrestle with all these really big problems are the challenge of 21st century policing and 21st century police chiefs. Can I ask, we have a couple of questions in the chat, but one thing that's puzzled me chief is that with the calls and I know that there are often exaggerated calls to defund the police and I'm not certain that that is the only thing that's going on with the people who are protesting is this defund idea. But if you lose police, my concern has always been about domestic violence. So I don't quite understand how if you're going to defund the police or even cause the police to be cut in any way, how are you gonna deal with the many calls for domestic violence? You certainly couldn't send a social worker into that kind of a situation. And that's, I really worry about that. There doesn't seem to be any consciousness that I know of among people who are saying to defund the police stating that one of the largest crimes that we face in this city and in the country is crimes against women in the home. And that only the police in that situation can arrest anybody or it can really solve that problem on an immediate level. I mean, how are you gonna do that? Yeah, so great question. And it's got so many parts to it. You're right that on the immediate level, oftentimes the police are the only response for that. I think the trick is to try to get upstream of it to the best that we can. I think another trick is to make certain that downstream we have adequate resources. And I think there are plenty of opportunities for other kinds of entities to be built or reinforced if they already exist in order to deal with those kinds of problems before they come to the point of being a police response. By the time you have neighbors calling because there is glass shattering and walls shaking and screens coming from the apartment next door, you've passed those points. You do have to have police. And we have to have at least two officers respond to that kind of scene. And that affects how we prioritize calls. But we saw an uptick, a great uptick in domestic incidents overall. It's domestic assaults that are misdemeanors, domestic assaults that are felonies and domestic disturbances. Huge uptick in those in 2020. Unsurprisingly, people were home and people were in close confines with one another. And those kinds of problems became something that came to the fore. What we do with that, we do need to make certain that we have the capacity to address them once they happen and are past the point of upstream intervention, past the point of social work. I think that defund has been used as a cudgel on both sides. It has been used as a cudgel by the people who want to augment other resources. And in some cases want out and out abolition. Abolition is absurd. It is absurd because it does not account for the darker parts of human nature. And it's not realistic, but it's not the bulk of the argument either. That is a fringe on one side. On the other side, you have, I think it was, it didn't do the center favors to have that topic and that word thrown around in the most recent election, for example, not Burlington's, but the national election. I think that the idea of defund has been used by one side of the aisle as fear mongering. And it has been used as another side of the aisle as an avenue towards abolition. And both of those are not going to get us anywhere. I do think there is room for enhancing and creating new resources in order to address upstream problems before they become police issues. I don't believe that means that we can afford to diminish police presence because the things that we still want the police to respond to, like an in progress domestic incident or a robbery or a homicide that requires a number of resources to be poured in in order to investigate and control a scene and hopefully apprehend a perpetrator, those still require the same number of officers. Officers in those respects are insurance policies for rare, but absolutely going to happen incidents. They are not going to stop happening no matter how much upstream work we do. They will still occur and we still need resources to handle them. And unfortunately, because they are labor intensive, resource intensive, we need a lot of resources to handle them.  Our fire department has a third the call volume of the Burlington police department, a little less as a matter of fact. And it currently has more people. And we accept that because we know that when a fire does happen and they're very, very rare, structure fires are very rare. But when they happen, we want to make certain that somebody's there to put that fire out. And somebody is there to make certain that as few people are harmed by that as possible, that it doesn't spread. And we know that it requires a lot of resources to unit it. So we don't accept that with policing. And it's unfortunate and frustrating to me. And some of it has to do with, I think a communications effort on our part about really sharing what it is that police do when it counts. Okay. Chief, we do have some other questions. Okay. So one of them is from Don Shram and Barbara Nolfi. Hi to the two of you. That question is, what have you done, John, to educate yourself about racism? Wow, great, great question. I mean, I myself, I read a lot. I certainly have participated in all of the trainings that Burlington has done in the time that I've been here. I was integral in introducing a lot of that kind of training in the NYPD as well. It was very involved with Bill Bratton's bringing in bias trainers and embracing implicit bias did a terrific module with Phil Goff on implicit bias worked a lot on the concept of heuristics in graduate school and the ideas behind how we make fast and slow decisions whether that's Kahneman's book or whether that's other kinds of studies. But with regard to racial issues too, the history of that whether we're talking about something as long ago as Nicholas Lehman's The Promised Land and its discussions of the Great Migration and the diaspora or whether we are talking about more focused studies about the great figures of the civil rights movement or more modern works like Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow, like those kinds of discussions about how we are still burdened by this original sin that came to the continent as soon as people came to the continent. And I think that again, a lot of work on that during my time with the NYPD and here we've brought a board in the Burlington Police Department we've been doing an iterative process with a racial bias, implicit bias and anti-racism trainer named Trustee Loving and Ms. Loving what we did with her rather than doing a one-off where we have one day and everybody comes in and sort of checks that box we have done this iterative process of six different lesson modules with her it's her own proprietary material. It has been remote because of the pandemic but what's really great about it is that she's done each of those multiple times in order to allow our officers to do the training as the same officer groups with whom they work. So the midnight's go together and the day shift right side goes together and our detectives go together and it engenders different kinds of conversations that she then facilitates and leads as they talk about these things. And that has been tremendously productive. We're nearing the end of it but I'm hopeful to be able to continue to work with her and do some projects. And there's a question from others that somehow I'm wondering what it means it says privately, does that person want me to read the question to the chief or not? Does that, I don't know what? Yeah, Eric, yeah. I'm going to read the question because I would imagine, I guess that is addressed to you chief Murad and that is how do you imagine that Burlington can achieve some form of racial equity inside the police force for issues such as homelessness and mental illness. What is your view of social workers being embedded in police force units? So I would love to have social workers embedded. We do have one social worker who works with us. Her name is Lacey Smith. I would clone her if I had that technology. I think she's amazing. I am incredibly appreciative of the work that she does. She interacts a lot with houseless individuals in Burlington. She worked very closely with the individuals who were brought into our hotels over the past year. We have had a very interesting year in 2020 with regard to issues around homelessness and attendant downtown disorder because many of those individuals have not been downtown. It's been a combination. Downtown itself is quieter but many of those individuals have been given housing and the idea of giving them housing is not the end all be all. It's not the only solution. Many of the individuals who are are relatively service resistant and who are people who we see out on the street more often are homeless or houseless sometimes for reasons and sometimes they actually have residences to which to go but they have a number of other co-occurring challenges whether those are substance use disorder issues whether those are mental health issues. And so the mere existence of a roof isn't the end all be all but it is a huge step forward. And we saw that this year with regard to decreased kinds of issues around that sort of disorder. We're gonna see it in rise because most of those individuals are losing that housing this summer. And so Lacey has been going to the hotels and interacting with them and delivering services to them where they are she will continue to do that once they are relocated whether that is to facilities like Cox or the new facility on Shelburne Road or whether that is unfortunately encampments like the one that we have on Sears Lane or other locations. Lacey goes to them and meets them where they are. Officers will too. I presented in January a plan called the public safety continuity plan to the city council. I developed it pretty much right after the defunding because I knew where we were going to be with regard to headcount issues. And the writing on the wall from the community was a component of this is a, if I discount the abolition aspect of it a component is we don't want as many armed officers showing up for incidents because an armed officer can always escalate to something greater. All right. So we developed a plan wherein we would increase the number of community service officers that we have or CSOs and those CSOs are unarmed. They're not sworn. They do not have law enforcement powers but the two that we have currently functioned primarily as animal control officers but they do some other kinds of work. And by onboarding more and the city council authorized me to hire 10 more I will be able to divest certain kinds of calls for service from the police to these officers. At the same time, the public safety continuity plan called for the unloading of six community support liaisons or CSLs and I know the acronyms can get confusing but the CSLs are not CSOs. They are social workers trained to deal with issues of houselessness of mental health of substance use disorder. The city council did not approve that part. I don't believe they want those aspects living in the Burlington police department. They approved one of the six and I am gonna onboard that individual to focus primarily on substance use disorder. The opioid epidemic got away from us in 2020 in an awful way but I want more. I want those individuals to co-deploy with police officers, not to deploy alone or to get to a situation where they then call police. I think that they work well in tandem because they share information in ways that is very difficult to do if they are based elsewhere. That's my opinion, it's not the way it's going to work out. I think instead, the city is going to be exploring working on a model similar to something in Eugene, Oregon called Kahootz and I think they're gonna do that with a bidder, whether that turns out to be, obviously Howard center would be sort of a logical kind of entity to do that. Maybe there are other entities that can think about it but that kind of expansion of existing mental health capacities such as street outreach and first call and then something else that models that Kahootz that follows that Kahootz model. Okay, there's another question. This person is saying, can you tell us about CSOs where are we with recruiting these unarmed officers and what will be their role? Are you getting a diverse pool of applicants? So these are unarmed officers, can you address that? That is correct. So the CSOs are not armed. They can't carry a firearm and they carry a pepper spray. They will wear a body armor but they are unsworn officers. They are able to do a number of different kinds of calls for service. They currently, as I said, do primarily animal control issues. They take fingerprints. They do certain kinds of VIN checks. They do some traffic control. We would expand that role to do presence patrol like on foot, on church street or on North street. We would expand that role to perhaps be able to address certain kinds of municipal ticket issues. A municipal ticket isn't a crime. It's something that's written into a charter and it's unlawful or it's an ordinance but it's not a crime and therefore you can enforce it even if you're not a law enforcement officer. You can write a ticket for noise. You can write a ticket for open container but we're gonna have to see whether that's possible.  The CSOs take about seven and a half months to train and to identify vet, hire and train. We are in the very earliest stages of that. I do have some candidates. We just devised a test for them and we're gonna be administering that test to the first couple of candidates very soon. Could we maybe have some identified people in a conditional offer before the end of this fiscal year? Maybe, probably not. We're probably gonna have that in the very, very, very beginning of the fiscal year and then we'll be able to do our extensive background process on them and then get them into a training situation but solo deployment probably won't happen until well after the summer. So we're not gonna be able to take advantage of them in the short term with regard to minimizing our use of what I called the priority response plan and the need at times not to respond immediately to priority three calls. That is gonna be something that we're gonna have to address over the summer but bringing them aboard as we do is I'm hopeful that we will minimize the need to use that priority response plan going forward. There is a question about a recent incident when the questioner says that a child called the Burlington police because his father was beating his pregnant girlfriend. The police responded. The father was hiding in the basement. He did not resist but the outcome was that the woman was uncooperative and that there were no charges. I'm concerned that because the team didn't respond. The child who had fled to a friend's house did not get the help of a social worker and the woman may have responded differently with someone trained to work with abused women in a domestic call. I've seen eight officers on a call. Why can't there be at least two mentally mental health trained social workers? Can I just make a comment as a lawyer? Cause I've dealt with a lot of these situations over the years. There are many times when a woman will not press charges. That's very unfortunate in my mind but it happens a lot. Women choose to stay in situations that are very bad for themselves and bad for their children too often, too often. For many reasons financial reasons, psychological reasons. And we would all hope that that doesn't happen but unfortunately it does. But maybe you can address why? The question is I think that why can't there be at least two mental health trained social workers? I think, is that what you meant? Questioner? I'd love that. That is the nature of the CSL component, the community support liaison component of the public safety continuity plan but it's the part that wasn't ultimately accepted. So that part wasn't ultimately accepted. When those resources are built out in other locations then asking them to come to a scene is quite possible. We do have a domestic violence prevention officer in the Burlington Police Department, invaluable role, able to dig into cases in a way that responding officers can't but isn't on 24 hours a day, there's only one. So does that officer go to an incident like this? No, not necessarily. At an incident like this one, we end up with a situation where we alert DCF, Department of Children and Families, and if we have a case like that, but absent injury without a complainant and without a clear sort of case in front of us, the threshold for taking custody of somebody in a situation absent a complainant is remarkably high. Okay, there is a follow up question to the one that was just asked before and that is, isn't the law today that regardless of whether a woman presses charges, police can act if they see harm? Why don't you address that? I can't, go ahead. I kind of, I think I did. I said that there have absent injury and absent a cooperative complainant, there is a very high threshold for trying to take somebody into custody. I agree. I think that what we're talking about instead is reporting appropriately. And I'll tell you that the vast majority of even when we make domestic violence arrests, those individuals are not held. They're released from the station house with citation. Vermont judges release everybody with a citation to appear in court at a later point. We hold, I think it is less than a third and I think it's actually less than 20% of the people to whom we, there's a difference between arrest and sight but they're both very similar in the public's mind. There are tickets that we give for traffic infractions or for having an open container of alcohol. There are citations that are given for most misdemeanors. In the state of Vermont, the vast majority of misdemeanors are issued what's called a citation to appear in court and officers cannot arrest for an unwitnessed misdemeanor. And that's not witnessed by a person that's witnessed by the officer. So the mere idea that a person says, this crime happened to me and that person did it is not sufficient for an officer to say, well, now that person is under arrest. In many other states it is. But here in Vermont, the officer has to have witnessed it and if he doesn't or she doesn't, then that officer is going to issue a citation to appear in court at a later date. Sometimes months later, sometimes months later. Sometimes months later. Right now it is many months later because the cart is backlogged. Hey, don't get me going on that about the law. I'm sure that's something. Right. But then there are a handful of misdemeanors that are called unwitnessed misdemeanors or where an officer doesn't have to witness it. Those generally are the misdemeanors that deal with violence. Domestic violence would be among those. There are then of course felonies that you don't have to witness that. If you've got the charges of a felony, you can take the person into custody irrespective of whether or not you witnessed it. So I get to a scene and a person has a knife inside him and he's pointing to the other person. That person is going to be arrested and brought back to the station. But I'll tell you this, even in that instance, if that individual doesn't have a significant record, doesn't have a significant history of not showing at court and has a residence in the city and that individual is still very likely to be released directly from the station house with conditions issued by the judge. Don't go near that person again, stop stabbing people but not held in jail and not held overnight. Not held after. And that's Vermont's sort of, that's Vermont's mode. And let's be honest, most of the time that is the right thing because we don't need to have people in custody. But there are times where we do and the pendulum has gone too far in that direction of non-custodial intervention. There's another question, Chief. What are your thoughts about the mayor of Ithaca's proposal to replace the city's police department with the Department of Community Solutions and Public Safety? I'm not in favor of that proposal in Ithaca. And it seemed to me that he, I don't know how much work he did on it because I think his police chief left when he announced it for lack of any preparation. The police chief left his job, you mean? I believe so. Wow. Okay, any follow up with that? Nope. All right. And then as a follow up also to the question about the uncooperative witness, basically, another question this person meant, a social mental health worker, why is that person a part of every team that goes out on a domestic? I think, did you answer that already? I think I did. Yes, but is that because of lack of funds? It's because the social workers aren't allowed to be part of the Burlington Police Department. There's another whole, I just want to comment a little bit on that. Domestic violence situations are the situations where the police get most murdered in those situations and most hurt in those situations. So a social worker, probably you wouldn't want to put a social worker in that kind of a dangerous situation. A domestic violence scene is very dangerous. I think anyway, I don't know what you think, Chey, but. It can be very dangerous. It's certainly up there for risk to officers. You can get to a situation where you can get to a situation where the person you're there to assist and help is actually, it turns into somebody who opposes the assistance. It's a complicated dynamic that it can be dangerous, yes. Yeah, there are other questions. Again, the proposal, I imagine that's the Ithaca proposal. The proposal doesn't abolish or defund the police, but rather redefine roles. I'm not certain what that means. In other words, the Ithaca program does not really abolish the police or defund them, but rather changes their roles. What changes would that mean even? Does anybody? It doesn't use those words, which I think really hurt the argument, but it does propose a different way of thinking about public safety. I like that. So, John, are there aspects of it that you think have value? I mean, have you looked at it? I assume you have. I have looked at it, not in depth. And I think that aspects of the Public Safety Continuity Plan are those are aspects that I'm in favor of. I think one of the main reasons is just trying to appropriately, and I think that's what we all wanna do is appropriately assign the people with the right training and the right weapons or not weapons to address a call, right? Right? Yes, I agree with that. I think that there is a, I don't know that there's a real understanding of the kinds of resources you still need for the calls that you're always going to want police to go to. So a lot of this comes down to funding. A lot of this comes down to a willingness to say, we have a service right now that because it is open 24 hours a day and 365 days a year, because it has the shortest telephone number in the country, we call 911 and they come and they come for everything. They come for everything because there are times a day where you'd say this isn't a police call and I'd rather call DPW, but they're not on. And so we have a, there's a dead animal in the middle of the road and it's causing a traffic hazard. That's a sanitation issue or DPW issue, but they're not 24 hours. And so the police come and deal with that. And we have a noise complaint next door and that might be a code enforcement issue or it might be something else, but the police are around and they're gonna come to that. They get to everything first and they're always available. And we've put a lot on their plate, but we could develop parallel resources that are also 365 days a year, 24 hours a day. I think it would be remarkably expensive. We could develop those resources to the point where we are able to say these are, this is a specialized thing that only goes to this and this and this. And here's a specialized thing that goes to only this and this and this. We could build the equivalent of the 35 item place setting that a particularly elegant house in the late 19th century might have had, but we don't use that anymore. The police are correll. They're microwavable and they don't break and you could throw them in the dishwasher and they come out and do what they're supposed to do, but they're not a 35 piece China setting. So building that takes refund, it takes, excuse me, it takes resources and funding. And in the end you have a shrimp fork that you only use when there's shrimp. And the rest of the time you're paying its salary and its benefits to be around just in case you have shrimp. So that is a possibility. I think that we definitely want to do that with the things that are much more important and are much more common. And mental health is definitely something that is like that. We have a lot of mental health issues that we want. I said before that the social workers, the city council did not approve the CSL positions to reside in the Brolin Complaints Department. That is what I meant by saying that those are not going to be able to co-deploy for an incident like this. They're gonna reside in other places. Could they come after the fact, after a scene has been stabilized in order to liaise with and meet with, for example, a complainant who suddenly unwilling to be a cooperative complainant? Absolutely. Irrespective of whether they reside in the police department and co-deploy in the same cruiser or whether they're coming from some other agency, that absolutely can happen. But what I meant by saying that they can't be co-deployed because it was determined that that's not where they're going to reside in the police department. We do have some rather long question which I will attempt to read. Anyway, this question is, I have a New York question for John to understand John's approach to policing and race. Having grown up in New York City in the 70s, I experienced a New York City police force that was extremely racial. Highland was burning, but the police really didn't serve the whole city. This only seemed to turn after the election of Mayor David Dinkins who introduced a much greater diversity in the police as well as a concept of community policing. His work was obscured by Mayor Giuliani, America's mayor, who turned it into a break a window policy. But I'm wondering what you can tell us from a professional perspective of the Dinkins reforms of the New York City police. Was it an advance from your point of view? How do you imagine Burlington can achieve some form of racial equity inside the police force? Equity is really a very used word right now. So I think this is really an interesting question, okay? How would you imagine then Burlington can achieve some form of racial equity inside the police force, John? So I think that, do we mean hiring? Is that what racial equity inside the police department means? Is it an appreciation for the presence of bias? Is it an understanding of how historic and systemic racism function? What is that equity and what is that goal? In New York, New York in 1990 saw 2,245 murders. It was the single bloodiest year in the city's history. 2,245 murders in a single year and up until about two years ago, a year and a half ago it was seeing in the high 200s and low 300s. So it had dropped by 2,000 almost, murders a year. That decline began with David Dinkins' mayorality the very last years of his mayorality but it only really took hold during the beginning of Bill Bratton's position as the police commissioner there. And it was driven, however, by one major factor and that factor was a huge hiring rush that had occurred in the last years of the Bush administration across the country that then President Clinton took great advantage of and perpetuated and brought massive numbers of new officers to the profession across the country. The decreases that were seen in New York both set the standard for and drastically drove the crime reduction across the rest of the country. It was not just a part of the movement, it was the movement for the first two years or three years. New York fell from 1990, it was a short, it was a small decline in 1991 and 1992 after that honest horribilice of 1990 but then it absolutely plummeted in 94 and 95 and 96 and then it tapered out a little bit and continued to decline until two years ago and it has since, it has gone drastically up. Now we're near the total numbers that we saw in those terrible years of the late 80s and the 90s but percentage-wise it has doubled over the past two years and that's for shootings and for murders. Something's changing in the city and it's in the wrong direction and we're seeing that across the country but how did they achieve some of that racial balance? That was achieved by hiring more and by having hiring standards and looking around the commissioner at the very end of Mayor Dinkins' mayorality was Ray Kelly but the commissioner immediately before him was a man named Lee Brown who later became the mayor of Houston and Lee Brown had a terrific line about the fact that policing preach his service but it hires adventurers and how do you kind of push back against that? And I think that he was able to find the beginnings of an answer for that. He left, commissioner Kelly did some work on it and then commissioner Bratton really brought in really leveraged those funds to bring aboard the largest classes in the department's history and be able to take that huge number of officers and say you need to go out and you need to address disorder. You need to listen to what the people in the communities are saying they wanna dress and what they were saying they wanted to dress was not merely the muggings or the violent crime that seemed at times ubiquitous because even when those crimes are at their highest they are a tiny fraction of the overall proportion of crime. Crime is driven numerically by larcenies and car breakings. And now those are everybody experiences those. And there were signs of surrender as it were in car windows where people would leave pieces of paper on their car window that says no radio because they just wanted to dissuade anybody from trying to break in and steal their radios. That was New York in the late 80s and early 90s. And so how you build on that you say, well, those kinds of crimes, those disorder crimes are the things that the public is clamoring about. And I'm gonna have these new resources and these officers go and address those. And we are able by doing that to also address the big stuff. It's an equivalent of getting upstream from the big stuff so that we're not just waiting for the big thing to happen and going into addressing that as well as we can. Now, if we can get even further upstream all the better so that we can start addressing the problems that really lead to that, but that's one method. I'm concerned right now with regard to the priority response plan that we've put together. I don't like not being able to respond to priority three calls because I think those priority three calls for service are the problem to reducing- But John, what are priority three calls? Okay, so the priority response plan, we announced it, I guess two weeks ago now, we put it into place in May knowing that we were gonna have to start using it. Our priority one calls are high priority.  They're not common. They constitute about 7.7% of the total incident volume in 2020. Our priority two calls are kind of in between. Many of them have a safety component. They are things like a burglary, although a burglary in progress would be a priority one. They are things like disturbances or disorderly conduct, although a disorderly conduct that appears to be about to become a fight or an assault would be a priority one. A disorderly conduct in the past or even a burglary in the past might be a priority three. And our priority three calls are the ones that we can afford not to respond to immediately if we are short on resources and overwhelmed by incident volume in a given moment. So the priority twos constitute about 43% of the total call volume. Remember priority one was about 7, plus percent, 8% and about half of the remaining calls are priority three. When we have fewer than two officers available to respond to something, we will not go to priority three calls. We have to maintain at least two officers available in order to go to a domestic violence that occurs in order to go to a robbery that occurs. And as a result, those priority three calls, noise complaints, vandalisms, certain kinds of crimes in the past, they will not get an immediate response. Okay, sorry, fast, go ahead. There's a few questions that we either haven't gotten to or skipped over. So I was wondering if you could- I don't see them then. I'm here, here's the next question that I'm seeing, okay? And that is, can you talk about your own decision, John? Am I correct, Beth? Okay. Can you talk about your own decision to apply to be the next police chief, that's the permanent chief, in light of your concerns about the direction of the racial justice resolution? To the person who asked that question, does everybody know what the racial justice resolution is? Okay, but John, maybe you can address that. Sure, it was a resolution put together by the city council last June that included a number of different parts. And with the exception of the part that required that the Burlington Police Department a trit by 30% before it could again hire and go from its then authorized number of 105 and we had about 92 officers to 74 officers. Aside from that one component of the resolution, I actually believe that it was a terrific resolution, had a lot in it, had requirements for training about racial equity and racial justice. It had requirements for what we did with regard to working out new levels of cooperation with the citizen police commission, which is an independent body and giving them codified ways to interact with the police department with regard to civilian complaints. And there were a number of parts, but the most salient part to this conversation is by far not the most important part of it, but the salient part to this conversation is that it required the police department to a trit by 30% before it could again hire. And that means we went, we have to go from our historical average of about 96 officers at any given time to 74. We're currently as of April 1st, we were at 82 on my books, but that is only 77 effective. I have a number of officers who are on long-term military deployments. I have some officers who are on long-term injury and those are not effective officers. I can't deploy them. So I'm down to 77, I'm down from 90, even when I had 96, they weren't all effective, but I had 94, 93 officers who I could deploy. So go down to 77, which I have now and it is dropping, means that I can't have specialized roles. The only specialized role that I have maintained is the domestic violence prevention officer because of its importance, but I don't have a community affairs officer anymore. I don't have an emergency response officer. I don't have SROs in the schools. That was another component of the racial justice resolution to remove SROs from the schools. I don't have enough officers to create what we used to have a swing shift which overlaps between our day shift and our evening shift. I don't have enough officers to create what we used to have, which was called the street crime team, which was something that could dig into cases a little bit more complicated than the road can deal with, patrol can deal with, but not as complicated that they would need the detective services bureau. And the absence of those resources and then the ability to at times deploy them for big incidents or for large scale events like July 3rd is a blow. So we have, for example, a look right now. I mean, right now we normally have about 68 officers assigned to the July 3rd event. I think we're going to have closer to 30 this year. So that was my question. So that was my question. And the real, just to the question, John, is, so given all of that, why are you applying for the job? Well, I'm looking forward to seeing what the mayor's listening to a result in. He's doing a lot of work right now to listen to the community. He's going to different audiences and understanding what it is they're looking for and he's going to write a job description based on that. Okay, well, there is another question from Sharon Bushar. She says, as I understand the city council's position on mental health and social workers is that they support the city council, support the expansion, but want them separate from the police department. That's correct. So they agreed to the public safety continuity plans request for six CSLs, but five of those are going to reside elsewhere and they haven't yet determined where those reside. And I don't believe they're anywhere near beginning the hiring process for them. So would you be hiring them or who? No, no, it would be determined by whomever. Let's say some of them go to work at the CJC or reside there.  Maybe someone would resire at other parts of CEDO, for other than CJC, those entities would have to identify them and vet them and train them and hire them. Okay. There are two comments. Should I read the comments or do those people want to make those comments themselves? They don't appear to be questions. No, there's comments. Okay. Okay, so people see those comments or what? Yeah, okay. All right, are there other questions for the chief? That's exactly. Okay, I would just ask one other question. And that is what is happening to crime rates in our city? Crime rates, the ones that we track are, so certain categories are going up and certain categories are going down. Let me see if I can actually find that. The numbers would be, unfortunately, on this computer, I have to shrink the screen and try to see if I can find it to give you some specific categories and information in those specific categories. If you'll, I apologize, just bear with me for a moment. But the directions are kind of, are complicated. It's not, however, about crime. As I said, shooting incidents or gunfire incidents are up and they're up significantly. We are seeing increases in overdoses. We're seeing increases in, as I mentioned before, domestic disturbance. I'm sorry, let me, here we go. So aggregated domestic incidents went up drastically from 2019 to 2020, from 604 to 643. Robberies spiked in 2019, went up in 2019, went down overall in 2020, that's partly just as a result of not having as many people around in the city to be robbed. Sex assaults went from 46 to 60. Significant increase in sex assaults in 2020. Felony assaults went from 50 to 51. That's up, but that's a pretty small up. Gunfire homicides and attempted homicides doubled from two to four. These are very small numbers. And that's one of the challenges with Burlington and looking at anything are these very small numbers and what equals a trend or not. Mental health incidents went up a lot in 2020. I think that's probably unsurprising. There are two ways that the Burlington Police Department tracks mental health incidents. There's a mental health issue, which is an entire incident. So that's how it's categorized. And then there's a mental health check box, which any incident can have that box checked if mental health was a component in the officer's estimation in that incident. From 2019 to 2020, mental health issue went from 764 to 946. And mental health check box went from 1260 to 1754. And then overdoses increased by 72% from 58 to 100. And that's not fatal overdoses. That's all overdoses. I don't have the figure for fatal overdoses I'm afraid. But we're seeing these kinds of categories and they're troubling categories. And I think that it is of concern to me isn't just the actual numbers of those crimes. Burlington's numbers are small enough that we don't use the same kinds of unified crime reporting numbers that other cities do. So the UCR is the FBI's way of tracking crime. And those are the seven major crimes. They are auto larceny, the law doesn't have a larceny statute. It is auto larceny and then it is larceny. It is a grand larceny, felony larceny. It is burglary. It is felony assault and then rape and then homicide. I think that's seven, although I wasn't counting on my finger so I'm not sure how many I just said. But those are in essence the seven majors. We have so few of most of those categories that it's not something that we track in that way. But I can find the data for you of course and I'm happy to provide it. Burlington has a terrific open data portal that's on the Burlington city website. You can access it through the Burlington Police Department site or other parts of the city site that lead to open data across a range of different categories in Burlington. And all of that crime data is one of those categories. You can track every single kind of incident, the 130 incidents that we track through our Valcor system, the computer system that dispatch slots every call for service or every incident gets into one of those 130 categories. You can track them across the last 11 years, not 11, nine years and in incremental amounts and month by month. It's a really, really robust and interactive data port to find all that stuff. John, we have one final question. We're running out of time. First of all, I wanna thank you very much for being here. I would like to ask this question because it comes from a city council member over in South Burlington and this is from Megan Emory. She says she's a city council member in the South Burlington. So she does, would like to ask the following questions. She says she's on two devices, apologizes for the poor video. How does the reduced force in Burlington affect mutual assistance calls? Yeah. And shared dispatch. She says I'm a South Burlington city councilor and so I'm asking as a municipal leader and as an constituent resident. I don't really know what all that means, but I hope you do. So I'll try to lay out the sort of the most shared dispatch. It doesn't affect at all council or the councilor. That's a separate issue and it hasn't progressed. We're not in it yet. Burlington's not in it. Our dispatch is independent and our dispatch is a unit inside the police department that dispatches both for fire incidents in Burlington and police incidents in Burlington. With regard to mutual aid, mutual aid is mutual aid as long as it can remain mutual. And I think that my neighboring communities have concerns about whether or not we are going to be able to answer when they need us. And so those other municipalities have actually, we've established a new letter with those other entities that is Colchester PD, UVMPD, Lewinowski PD and South Burlington PD that ensures that they will not respond to a incident in Burlington unless there is a Burlington officer on that incident as primary. So the night of the gunfire incident that I mentioned, it was during one of those huge parties that happened on Isham Street. Really massive parties. Why? Yeah, officers went to that party. They could not break the party up. They took bottles and cans from students and party goers. They retreated. An hour later, there was a gunfire incident. That meant every officer on duty went to the location to try to figure out what has happened here. Multiple calls. Fortunately, nobody struck, but they did recover evidence. They know that a gunfire incident occurred. It wasn't just somebody doing fireworks. We know that a person fired a gun or in the midst of that crowd. And that was every officer. At the same time, a domestic violence incident occurred. And we requested assistance from UVM and SPPD. They went to that call. They won't do that in the future. I would have to break off or my supervisor on scene would have to break one of the officers off the shooting call. Send that officer to the domestic violence to be the primary. He or she would be joined by somebody from South Burlington or UVM. And maybe I would also request somebody from South Burlington or UVM to come in and fill that officer's spot at the crime scene if I really need all six. And we did that night. And so that is a complicated kind of interaction. But our neighboring communities don't want to, they have resource issues of their own and they have needs of their own. Well, anybody else have any final comments? I would like to thank the chief for coming tonight and for talking to us. And maybe he will again, because it's an ongoing concern of all of our citizens in Burlington. And I really want to thank him for being here with us tonight. And anyway, good night. Next week we'll be discussing, I believe an international issue of Haiti. And so I hope you all join us again then. But, and I'm very, I'd be interested in joining that. At the NYPD, after the Haitian earthquake, we put together a team of NYPD officers to embed with the Haitian National Police. I actually created the program. We took officers who were Haitian, spoke Haitian Creole, and we embedded them with the Haitian National Police in order to exchange best practices and try to get them back on their feet after that terrible, terrible earthquake. I think that- Well, then I will, Beth, Beth make sure you include him on the invite. The speaker next week will be Tim Reiser, who was from Senator Leahy's office. And he's been doing a lot of negotiations about Haiti. And so we're gonna welcome him next week. But thank you all for coming tonight. And thank you particularly, John, and good luck with this new hiring process, okay? Thank you. See you later. Thank you for all being here. Thank you. Thank you. Bye. Bye.