So Senate government operations it is Thursday May 13th. We have had a little difficult technical difficulty getting started here, but rest assured we have been doing nothing business like the only thing we've done is try to figure out how to get ourselves hooked up and going. So committee Michael Shirley will be joining us at two. He couldn't make it any earlier. We might even be done by two. You always look like you're on a golf course with all this green behind you laying down company rules. This is our official background. What what does it say. It's Vermont agency transportation. Oh yeah I see you have to kind of get up close to see it really I've seen Michelle boom hour without that background I've seen Joan Flynn without that background. How interesting it was it came from Michelle. Just saying. Hey I'm, you know I've been here 10 months I'm still a new get the new kid on the block here so you know I just do as I'm told me. Maybe it's a hazing thing you know it zoom hazing. There we go. So, um, I know. I don't know who all is going to be with us today. And Tony, I am happy to see you. What, what I did was I scheduled this because I had, I didn't want to leave this completely hanging. I think it's important in my mind anyway to assure people that my plan for the committee is that we go forward with this clearly it isn't going to happen this year. I apologize for that we got caught up with a bunch of other things I think that we got off to a kind of a rocky start without a bill and I should have been more attentive to that and make sure that we had a bill clearly at the beginning and I, I feel it's important to go forward with this issue and I just wanted to get a sense from people if, if they felt the same and from committee members and also from the people out there in the field. So, I suspect that the commissioner won't be with us as he said until two o'clock and I suspect that he would feel it important to go forward but I won't speak for him but so committee members are you I'm fine with the procedure just outline manager. I think we could spend the good part of the afternoon fine tuning what we have and look forward to getting it drafted in January. I've been I'm somewhat a skeptic I started as a skeptic of this whole process but I think we've actually made some good progress in this conversation over the last couple of weeks or months whatever it's been weeks months years seems like we've been sitting on this couch forever but I think we've made some good progress and so I'm willing to continue to move forward on it. Senator Clarkson. Thank you madam chair I would echo Anthony's comments I think that we have made good progress and it's beginning to take shape. I think actually it does a lot of administrative. I don't know what the quite the right word is but it I think it streamlines things I think it improves things actually, once we finish get through to the other end. I think it's going to be a big improvement. I think we can address some of the concerns that have been raised and I, I think this is a positive step forward for public safety, combining and bringing under one umbrella, a lot of these areas that address and are our professional public safety arms. Divisions. Senator Ron. Do you feel you. Okay, I'm just, I'm hands free and I echo senator pulling his comments as well. I would just hope that over the time away the commissioner could further document the feedback that they received in their public process around modernization and how they incorporated that into this proposal because I just still don't feel like I have a sense of how they really listen to the people who they engaged in the public participation process. Okay, yep. And I think that the comments that they received were addressed more than just the reorganization of the department into an agency but we can ask him to give us more information for us when we come back in January on that. Okay, so I'm going to ask Cindy and Tony where they, their feeling on this is whether we go forward it sounds like the committee wants to wants to move forward. Tony do you want to go first or you're muted though. My computer is going a little slow today. Sorry about that. Good afternoon everyone I think, you know we're definitely hearing the concerns here as you know chairs to Ralph has mentioned about, you know roles and I think that the coming year will really help our council kind of solidify mission and direction and that you know we'll be in a much better place for conversations about this type of work year from now than we are right now so I think it's good, you know from our perspective it helps us and the new council sort of get a more solid footing from for future conversation so good good for my end. Okay good thank you. Tony. Tony fakers executive director for for the division of enforcement and safety department motor vehicles. Yeah I mean is Madam chairs you know I've always, even from the municipal side been very supportive of regional efforts I think it is absolutely the future of public safety. That being said, and I'm basing off the last draft that Amron did I think the 2.4. I think that's the last one we have. Yeah. Yeah. So, I've, I've, I'm still cautiously optimistic at this point, but I wanted to be make be absolutely clear that you know I think there's a lot of opportunity and work to still be done. I need to have several conversations I think with Commissioner Sherling. Right now, one of the things though it's kind of glaring to me in this current draft anyway just to flag it for everybody. There's, there's some of the frustration and the concern that my team has that we've got about 30% of our sworn personnel came from the Vermont State police. So, I mean there's very various reasons that they're here and they're very concerned about not being. You know, if, if for example if VSP is short somewhere, could they their jobs totally change and can they be pulled from one division to the other. And that was in the original executive order that Commissioner Sherling and I were really careful to make sure that we appropriately had some, you know, I hate using terms silo in a negative sense but we, you know, but we were, you know, those, those, those boundaries were there so that we could maintain our special expertise within motor vehicle enforcement.  If you look at page six, it just makes reference that the how they would be you know, if you're under under, you know, the very first part under B, you know, should not be assigned transferred outside their division unless the member requests to transfer and the commissioner approves the transfer and then when you go to page seven under permissive duties, it makes clear that the commissioner may with the approval of the secretary transfer classified positions within and between divisions subject to the state personnel laws and rules so forth. So anyway that that certainly was of great concern to my team. And, you know, I just want to make sure that I, you know, I've, I also don't want to have a mutiny on my hands I want to make sure that they understand that you know they're not just going to be, you know, we're not being moved around, based on what one particular department needs. Because the other thing is, you know, we're clear eyed that in a crisis in any major challenge, we will always pitch in I mean, two of our investigators for example sworn personnel both from the detect one of our detectives and one of our, you know, uniform sergeants were assigned to the Department of Health for contact tracing and provide their expertise to the Department of Health I mean so we are committed as always to serving for monitors and supporting, you know, all of our, you know, fellow law enforcement agencies. So that's, so that kind of language those some of the details anyway that I want to make sure that, you know, we're absolutely are clear on. And I've also already testified and I've been very consistent with the, I think, with the other pinning of a Bureau of Professional Standards, one of the advantages that's that's, it's laid out in the very beginning of this is that it streamlines policy for example, when they're when a policy change needs to be implemented. You know, it's going to be real time for any law enforcement entity within this agency. The other thing I just for the sake of discussion. You know, the last testimony, you know, VSP has back they have that advisory support. And without doing anything to dilute the success of the state police and that you know from, including their clear accreditation. But I'd like to see opportunities of value added to the motor vehicle department as well in terms of training. You know, professional opportunity support as well as internal affairs and accountability. And so it just seems like, you know, where's where's that specific in this language anyway, how do we add that value to how we operate, because I think the bottom line is the public expects. Regardless of the uniform and the specialty, whether it's, you know, warden or motor vehicle inspector, you know, certain standards, if they are a sworn law enforcement officer, certain standards must be consistent throughout. And I think that's a great opportunity as we look at police reform and everything that we're doing. And it makes us more nimble as an overall agency in that construct. And in the meantime, you know, I just want to make sure, and I know our union representative is not not on the on this call right now or this hearing but that's really their their concern as well. So I want to make sure that, you know, we absolutely are cautious. I know this right because this is a big opportunity, I think for the state of Vermont to improve public safety, but it has to make sure that it adds value to every entity that comes on board. So, yes, Senator Palmer. Thank you madam chair. So Tony, I think you're right. When you read the two different pieces of language regarding, you know, getting switched back and forth between divisions. It does seem like there's some confusion there at least, maybe not confusion but lack of clarity perhaps. So I do think we probably need to take a look at that. Would you be okay with the ability of someone to move if the employee and let's just say a supervisory person both agreed that that's what they wanted to happen. Absolutely that was in the mechanics of even the original executive order. You know they would still be the employee would have to make that request to transition. And then of course it needs that would need to be approved based on those operational needs of each each division under that under that department. And I take your other point well to that training and the potential for advancement and that sort of thing. I think it should mirror what we have for the BSP. And that makes a lot of sense to me. Thank you. So it might be, if I can suggest that over the, the break before we come back in January, that you might work with the commissioner around the language particularly on page seven there that just seems to contradict what the other language says and see if we can come up with some language that that makes it clear that that there can in time of crisis or something that they there will be cross-pollinization but that it won't be willy-nilly just capricious transfers because that does sound like it could be here just the secretary and the commissioner making the switch. Absolutely. And I think a lot of that too is language we can probably, you know, revitalize from part of the original executive order that 68 page document where we did kind of spell that out initially, but your points well taken, Madam chair. And I also, in terms of what Senator Colmar was saying around the making sure that that there's value added to the DMV positions and how that making it kind of the equivalent of the BSP how if there's language that should be in here around how to how to achieve that. I mean we can't in statutes we don't get so detailed about everything but if it's if it's something that should could be in here that would make it clear and then established by rule or something. Yeah, I mean my point was not so much to like for example a lieutenant here motor vehicle has a very different mission from a lieutenant in the Vermont State police, especially when I think about a station, you know, a station commander. And I'm not looking for necessarily, you know, quality there. But what I am thinking about though, more broadly is, as you look at professional standards, you know the training component opportunities that you to get really them to maximize the, you know, the intent and expected outcome of an agency with that would have those opportunities, as well as the accountability piece. So as I've said in previous testimony, for example, the internal internal affairs process for accountability is very different for anybody outside the Vermont State police that still sworn whether you're a fish and wildlife or armored liquor control, or any of our folks. And I think again I'm trying I'd like to see you know is to get to that that consistency as well. And so that's what I meant by by that. In general, I mean I bounced off some ideas with a commissioner, Commissioner Shirley on on some of my vision, what that could look like, where there's, there's, you know, absolute buy in from both both divisions to support something as of again a, a bureau if you will, for example of professional standards. You know, that's not specific within either either division but above both divisions but under the under the would become the commissioner of the Department of law enforcement, as an example of what I mean by that. Any other questions or comments for Tony, or in general. I had a conversation with a sheriff. One day about because this this really only a lot this doesn't impact at all our municipal departments or our county sheriffs, or our constables, because this is just really an organization at the state level but. But we were wondering if there's, if somehow the under this. I think that Commissioner called a division of support services. The support services that are there that are intended for the other sworn law enforcement officers could also be extended to the sheriffs and some small municipal departments that just don't have the capability of, of doing all that grant writing and personnel work and all of those things I have no idea if that's even possible but I think it might be something that we can explore over the, the summer to find out if it's even possible at all Allison, Senator Clarkson. No Allison's fine. I, I think that's a, I think that's a really worthy thing to research because once this becomes an agency, it has the possibility of becoming really a resource for all of law enforcement and all of public safety. And, and we don't necessarily know how that might look 10 years from now but it, I think it would be an interesting avenue to explore particularly as we really have been wanting to regionalize a lot of these services for a whole host of reasons. And it no I think that would be a great, a great thing to explore. I'm not sure how you would do it, but I think that right now within the department, which would still be within the agency be emergency management does provide assistance and support to local emergency management people, and, and fire safety does the same. I haven't done that with law enforcement so I, I just don't know how that could work but it well I think it, it, I would agree because it also begins to get at reducing the sort of the patchwork problem the, and, and, and, and, and maybe creates a framework for coordination in a more consistent way. And if you, and if you think about it, you know, if you have a small department, a small department or a sheriff's office with few employees if, if they each have to duplicate all of those administrative services. That's a lot of inefficiencies, and a lot of. I don't know if it would work or not at all but it's, it's something that I've been thinking about. And have had some conversations with some sheriffs. And, yeah, center point. I think it's a good thought. Yeah. No, I do I think providing resources to the local communities that have little for a little police forces at all it's really going to be really helpful. I'm just around hiring somebody how do you go about hiring how do you look, how do you review resumes what do you look for how do you just, um, because I think being made being made aware of state and federal money that's available. Like you said writing grants I mean that can be really helpful we did a little bit of that different but similar in agriculture where we assigned these grant writers to work with farmers and local communities around the state. And one of the resources to write their own grants and it's generated like a huge amount of money for those communities that they wouldn't have gotten if it wasn't for the help they got in terms of facilitating the grant preparations. That's an interesting that's interesting yeah. So the other thing I have been mulling around in my head a lot is this report that was put out by the auditor. And I don't know exactly what to do with it because it in my mind it's. And I like our auditor a lot and I think he does wonderful things but in my mind, this is a fair is. Many people associate public safety with law enforcement and this report on the local and state spending on public safety. It lumps in everything it lumps in all of the judiciary, and all of the sheriffs and the defender general and the state's attorneys court diversion 911, the justice, the training, the criminal justice council, criminal justice council, Woodside victim services it's all in here under public safety, but it gives the impression that we are spending millions and millions and millions of dollars on public safety when in fact, if you break it down, what's being spent on actual law enforcement is very little compared to that whole. I just I don't know what to do with this but I know that it's out there, and that people have commented on so does anybody have any suggestions about where we might, or should we just ignore it. I don't think we want to ignore it. I think it would be helpful to clarify what we consider public safety and that we don't actually consider. I mean I don't consider all any of the court I think of the judicial branch is being very different. I mean, it would be interesting for us to actually define for state government. I mean I'm sure we have it in the statute somewhere where public safety is defined. I don't know. But I think that would be helpful, because otherwise you're going to have reports like this where he drew in unnecessarily, I think, whole areas that that I'm not sure are under that umbrella. And corrections is in there also. And so I think that that bears further discussion which is really clarifying as we look at the agency clarifying what we consider public safety.  I did. Senator Clarkson spoke pretty much to my point, what I would suggest is whether the auditor wants to do it or someone that has the report and can kind of divide up. How much is spent on judicial matters how much is spent with corrections and get a fair number for what is is public safety and law enforcement because I agree with the I think that the number is probably swollen to a point where it looks. It looks much bigger than it really is. I actually have done that. Oh, well. It is, it kind of isn't here broken down. And like there's $162 million by cities and towns. But again, it lumps in their, their law enforcement their emergency planning their EMS systems if they operate their own ambulances all of that. And the Department of Public Safety itself is $109 million. And that is more than just law enforcement. I mean, I think we need to. My concern is that there has been concern about the, the making the agency that it's creating a super police agency, which I, I think it's actually doing the opposite. But I think we need to be very clear about what is spent on law enforcement so that we can look at that it just law enforcement itself. So, anyway, that's just a. I don't know what to, how to approach this if we. I'll, I'll send out some figures to everybody before then so that we can actually look at it, but so yeah, I'll do that. I don't know what else to do with this report, except to just. Well, one. One thing. Yeah, go ahead. One thing. One thing we could do is actually ask the auditor to streamline the report and have him. Their office focus and maybe pull out the areas we consider public safety as we look to actually define public safety in the creation of this agency. Which I think it should be part and parcel of that work. And, and that if he was willing to actually pull out and do a. An edit or draft two of his report, which just pulled out the areas we consider part of public safety, which you've done it sounds like you've done that work. But if there is he feels that as we go into this work of establishing an agency, if there are areas he feels we need to pay particular attention to as we go through that process. I think that would be valuable, but I think we need to streamline it so that we're all on the same page with what we're talking about. Because he dies the way here is his definition of public safety, the efforts of any government agency department or subunit, whose mission relates directly to ensuring the safety and security of Vermont residents. Well, but that's entire state government I mean I think that's our primary purpose. Well, that's how he defines it. Let's get out some of these numbers here. So that we can just have a better sense of what we're talking about because I just don't want people to think that by when I'm linking linking this with the creation of the agency. I don't want people to look at the creation of what some people think of as a super police agency and then look at this auditor's report that says we spend $574 million on public safety. And use that as fodder for the discussion. Yeah. To be fair, I don't consider the public defender to have anything. Well, it might have something to do with public safety. We're right. Let me put it the other way. When I think of public safety, I'm not thinking of the public defender. Maybe a way of doing it is to look at the agency, if we were to create an agency, how much of this money it would be assigned to the different departments, the Vermont State Police Department of Motor Vehicles, home emergency management, fire safety, and do it that way so that we can actually see how it relates to the creation of an agency. That makes sense. That would be great. All right, I'll work on that. Any other specific comments on where we were with the bill? I don't know. What are we calling the bill at the moment? Is it Amaran? Is it under Amaran's name? Yes, and it's draft request 210890. And what I think makes sense is to have, if Tony can work on some language here and anybody else who has concerns about specific language, Cindy, if the council has specific language concerns or anything is try to get it together and we'll get it to Amaran and then we'll get it as a bill so that when we come back in January, there's an actual bill with a number, but we've worked out a lot of the issues before we actually get the bill. Can we make it a committee bill? We can, but if we make it a committee bill, we won't have a bill for people to respond to until we get back. I'm not sure if we're ready with this draft to make it a committee bill. I don't know. So what I, what I, what if we can all, or any of us can sponsor it, but I think it's, I think we need to have something in bill form for people to respond to in January. I don't know if that makes sense or not. Makes sense. That makes sense because then we have something for people to respond. Yes, we have a foundation for discussion. Because it's been so fluid that it's hard for people I think to comment on it and make comments and stuff and I've had a bunch of meetings in my community with people and most people have said they support the concept and support the idea of making it truly a public safety agency instead of a public safety agency. The Department of Public Safety is so kind of associated with the troopers that it's hard for people to get past that. So what I've heard in my community is that people support the reorganization. They just don't know the details yet. So, I think that would be helpful. I agree. Okay. I'm going to go spend more time going through the bill. Does anybody have other specific issues that they would like to have worked on over the summer fall and I will be happy to work with them. I just appreciated Mr. Fakus' articulation of a Department of Professional Standards or some kind of quality oversight entity that sits above all of the other divisions. And I think it could do a lot around justice oversight and inclusion. Isn't that what the council, the role of the council? To some extent, but I, you know, I haven't yet heard that the council has direct supervisory power. So they might hear something when it becomes an issue, or when someone's being trained to become a police officer, but there's a lot of other time and space in between before something rises to the level of investigation that I think requires ongoing supervisory work. I'm not sure how that, well, you have to think about that because I'm not sure I don't know, Tony, what you were referring to, were you referring to some kind of a board that had, that oversaw professional standards other than the council, or how, what were you? Yeah, I know Commissioner Shirley is now on the, on the. Good, as well. You know, my thought was simply an expansion of, you know, the Office of Professional Standards that they have within the Vermont State Police and the commissioner could speak more to that. And more in the, in the context of broadening that entity so it would have direct ability to, you know, for example, tracking the training and providing training priorities and goals that would be that would be where their universal needs, regardless of the specialty of the law enforcement function, but also the internal affairs process. So again, anybody that that is with under the Department of law enforcement would be held to a certain standard does not mean that we would all necessarily have the same. I mean, again, we would have some different policy for motor vehicle that are specific to commercial vehicle enforcement, for example. And the issues that were really faced with anybody that is sworn law enforcement officer. Those standards, there has to be a direct mechanism, I think, to not only provide the training and the support mechanisms but also the accountability piece. And it's in it, and it's just like the internal affairs process. You mentioned what municipalities are doing. I do know that the chiefs are working hard to come up with a way to develop capacity to handle internal affairs. They're trying to get a pool of investigators around the state that have gone to specialize training on how to conduct internal investigations, because there's a lot of pieces to that. And so everybody's trying to get to I think the same place. And I just, it's only my idea was a thought of how do we do that, that would support, for example, the motor vehicle division. You know, again, not to do anything that would dilute Vermont State Police, but how do we enhance it for any other division that falls within the under the commissioner of law enforcement. So maybe, maybe, let me just think this out. Maybe that one of the support services under the division of support services is some kind of an internal investigations. Or something, and that we just need to make sure that it cooperates or coordinates with the council so that we're up, but that would then maybe be able to provide the same kind of support to the municipal PDs who are looking for some kind of support and commonality and how to how to do it without each having to have their own. I don't know. So Commissioner Sherling, I'm glad you joined us and I apologize for not for it being May 13 and we're still here. But what I wanted to do today was to find out from the committee and from others. It was my feeling that we should go forward with this bill and have a bill in January that is as well thought out as possible and has all as many kinks worked out as possible, so that we can actually move, move it relatively quickly in January. And so what we're doing today is just kind of thinking of what might need to go into the bill to have it as ready as possible. And then Tony has suggested a couple areas where he and you are going to work on some language. And then we started talking about. I had mentioned that I've talked to a couple sheriffs that were, we were just playing with the idea of under the division of support services that you have in here is there can be sheriffs and maybe even municipal PDs contract with the agency under the division of support services to receive some of those support services that they themselves can't supply because it's very inefficient for everybody to have their own grant writer or human resources person or whatever it is so then then we got into the conversation of internal investigations and how that, how that might work. So that's where we are. Got it. Thanks for having me back for the record Mike Sherlin commissioner of public safety. I should check in and just make sure you can't hear the chainsaw. That's outside. The, we would be open to a discussion of providing additional support services to other organizations. I would suggest that it probably makes sense to do that in an iterative fashion and not try to put that into the first version of if an agency were to come to fruition next year to put it in immediately just because we wouldn't want to complicate transitions and make sure we could spend the requisite time, ensuring that the few components we've contemplated initially are are brought together effectively. I did listen in on just in the last few minutes on the discussion of both professional standards and internal affairs. So the committee is aware in statute you created many decades ago. There's a very distinct split where the office of internal affairs reports directly to me outside the chain of command of the state police, and then reports directly to the state police advisory commission. That's done very intentionally. I think that's one of the advantages to expanding the scope of that office and potentially even of SPAC. I don't want to speak on their behalf because they are an independent entity, but it would be an interesting exploration to expand the scope of SPACs work. I'm not short of saying that that would work outside of state government, but it would be an interesting exploration to look at SPAC being a piece of the puzzle for the other state law enforcement entities that are contemplated to come into the agency, either potentially in the future. And using that internal affairs investigatory model in the same fashion where it is very specifically independent of the command structure of those organizations and reports to the, in this case, the commissioner in the case of an agency, the secretary directly. I will flag on the conversation around internal affairs and municipal departments and sheriffs. That gets quite a bit more complicated in, in part because they have different. They have different governmental structures and are completely independent of the state and have different rules and regulations and many instances and on key topics we're moving toward having universal rules and policies but there are differences based on municipal regulations, municipal charters, etc. So that's probably not at this point in the evolution something that works. But the chief I will flag for you that the chiefs and sheriffs have put forth a framework in response to our 10 point plan that we put forward last year they came up with a framework that is ready to be explored on improving and making more independent governmental investigations to then report back through the government structures that they would be working for, whether it be a sheriff's office or municipal government or, or whatever the case may be just important to note that there are elected officials in the case of a sheriff they're the elected official in the case of municipalities there are. There are seven mayors there are select boards and in some cases, in many cases there are appointed town managers that have oversight and so it's really the investigative component that needs the consistency and, and then the oversight is done by whoever the elected officials are in those particular jurisdictions. I will flag one other thing for you which is the relationship between and I'll talk specifically about the state police, the relationship between internal affairs, the state police advisory commission and the criminal justice council, which you have over the years, given more and more and more responsibility I think, rightfully so and a well designed system to do. Sorry I'm a little distracted by the noise I'm glad you can't hear it but it's interrupting my thought process just to touch the professional standards and certifications so the importance of that is that not only do you have a track to hold officers and internal and general accountable through internal affairs process, relative to the rules but there's a parallel process relative to certification de certification and accountability. And the relationship there is that for the state police in particular, the Office of Internal Affairs regularly as necessary reports. I don't have any rules any findings that I make and back up holds to the criminal justice council for certification action and that's that's how those two things are connected and those parallel processes work. I'll stop there. So Cindy spoke earlier about how in a year, they will be in a much better position to kind of weigh in on the details of what we're talking about and how all this relationship works and we acknowledge that they only really got going in January with this new new structure so. And I just to go back when you were talking about the that there's different because of the different kind of municipalities and sheriffs and stuff, but what I was thinking of was just the investigative. Because Tony mentioned that the number of the chiefs were trying to figure out how to maybe hire a pool of investigators that they could draw on. And, and I was thinking maybe that pool of investigators is the same pool of investigators that is used by your by the agency but it was just a thought. I think that model has has efficacy that that shared model where you're one of the most important components is whether there's two that stand out one is having folks that are trained in internal affairs specifically so it's not just whoever you happen to have to come off the shelf because there are legal issues and there are nuances to those investigations that are different than criminal investigations, although the same skill sets apply and overlap and much of the, much of the case. It's not entirely overlapping the other is that ensuring that whoever is doing the investigations has no pre existing relationship with the person being investigated. And, you know, that's pretty easy that they're not friends or haven't worked together. It comes a little harder when you're trying to get complete detachment they've never done a case together they've never had to back each other up, and that pool statewide pool with regions to pull from is, I think a great model to be able to do that where people are completely disconnected, have may have heard a name, but I've never met this person before, and can go do an independent investigation without I should be really clear without the perception that there is a an issue, even in smaller areas that I have been a part of it, the fact that people know each other does not typically play into a an internal investigation. I've said this repeatedly and I've heard just about every chief in Vermont and elsewhere say this we are our own worst critics. When something goes badly. We actually go a little overboard in terms of what we think the repercussions should be. So tempering that is sometimes important. Nice, good question. Yeah, sure, sure. Commissioner, would you, would you also agree that it's not ideal for the person to have been part of the department or agency being investigated. It depends on the circumstances. You know in the case of the state police, there's 300 troopers spread across the state and 212 towns and 10 barracks that you achieve the same goal by having being able to assign a captain from southern Vermont who's never met a trooper from northern Vermont. And the same could apply even in a smaller organization like the Department of Motor Vehicles in Burlington, for example, we would assign folks that were in different divisions, and there are generational differences between folks so you can get detachment. In many instances, it does become more and more difficult when you're in a very small PD and everyone's working together so I think there's an advantage both to the, the perception of the independence the investigation but also, we shouldn't discount the importance of putting other employees in a difficult position to have to investigate when you, when you only have five people and, you know, 20% of the departments investigating another 20% of the department. That gets, like I said, much easier when you get to a larger organization where there are distinct differences and divisions and geography. So, my, the more simplistic answer is it depends, but in some instances you are, you are right Senator. Small state it's hard to get independence from around anything. I will just, I'm going to call on Senator Calmore but I, many, many years ago, my car broke down on 91 right near Randolph and I got it down to Randolph, and they were working on it. And I decided to go have lunch while I was waiting, and I was sitting there and I did not know a soul in Randolph. This was years ago and I just, and this guy walked in and said, Oh, I know you. He happened to be the town manager of Randolph and I was on the Community Development Board and I said, Oh my God, you've got to be careful wherever you go in this state. So anyway, Senator Calmore. Thank you Madam Chair. So I want to step outside the investigative investigative world for just a second. The commissioner mentioned, you know, many different governmental kind of structures with regard to our law enforcement community. And I think to the average for monitor. There's got to be a pretty common perception of what our professional standards are regardless of whether you're a sheriff, or a constable, or Vermont State Police Officer or a local PD. I'm just wondering how different that governmental structure is really in the end. You know, in the eyes of what we might consider a typical citizen. That's a, that's a great question center and thank you for allowing me to clarify it really what I'm speaking to is really more of the process than than anything. The code of conduct for law enforcement is is pretty well galvanized. It's actually called the code of conduct. The general rules are generally are pretty well galvanized individual operating policies do differ based on geography resources, etc. So for example the policies that state police have do differ. In a number of ways from the policies that I wrote when I was in Burlington because the urban say that with a little you and says urban as we get the urban operating environment is quite different than a rural operating environment that the state police operate in and as a result of policies and procedures that govern that those operations are different. And what I was really talking about was that there's a municipal human resource process that's been established. Those do differ in terms of flow based on a variety of different factors. And that's what we have to be differential to on that in that particular lane of travel relative to adherence to policy and procedure and the rules of that particular government entity that the agency operates under. The advantage to what's been developed in recent years and professional standards is in addition to that there are universal professional standards that the Criminal Justice Council has. And even if something doesn't pass muster for being a terminable offense in a municipality or in the state, it is conceivable that at a state level relative to certification, you have deemed that that is something that should be decertified and you have a parallel track to do that. I also want to just for the record mention that I think Senator White is correct. In many people's eyes, the Vermont State Police equal law enforcement in Vermont to a great degree I think that's what people think of when they think of that. At one time it might have been true that the Vermont State Police officers were the quote most professional of all of the law enforcement that we had. I'm not sure that's true anymore. You know, many municipal law enforcement officers, local PD sheriffs that get an equal amount of good training and that do very good work and an active sort of just another piece of law enforcement if you will so just for the record I, I appreciate the work that that all of law enforcement does in the state. Thank you for that Senator I think you're right that I've watched for the last 30 years as the level of professionalism has increased exponentially some of the people that I were I was hired with. Originally, had never been to a police academy it didn't exist when they came on board. That is no longer the case but it wasn't that long ago that there were still people in the profession who didn't have the benefit of training because it hadn't been developed yet. So, I think that's right and I think Vermont, we do lose sight of this among all the challenges we have that Vermont is very fortunate to have a very high level of professionalism high level of training. I would say that the people run police academy and knock on wood, you know, relative to, to many other places that are less fortunate than us are in in pretty good shape, lots, lots of work to do. But I would put up, I would put our folks against just about anybody in the country in terms of capacity, professionalism, etc. I agree with you. And did you know that this is just an aside but did you know that you don't have to be certified law enforcement officer to be a sheriff. Anybody, I could run for sheriff if I wanted to. Yes, I did know that it used to be you didn't have to be an attorney to be a state's attorney that you fix that we fix that. We fix that, but we haven't fixed the sheriff yet. Are we able to fix that or is that if that's not constitutional what its requirements are. No, and I don't know that it. There probably wouldn't be many instances where a non law enforcement person would run for sheriff anyway because they, it would. It would surface so well know what would happen is that they could only do the administrative parts of the job they'd have to hire somebody to do the law enforcement parts. They're not going to like that because that means they have two positions sharing one budget, everyone one salary. So, I don't think that's likely to happen. Well also they get stuck doing the paperwork and instead of the grunt work instead of actually having the fun of being law enforcement. Right, they don't get to ride in a car with a bubble on the top. Right. Tony, what were you doing there. You're muted Tony. My apologies that I just talking to commissioner real quick on something. The other commission. It's fine. I just thought it was pretty funny. Anybody else have. So my here's, here's what I'm going to suggest. We look at this bill. We. We're going to ask Tony and the commissioner to work on a couple parts here last the council to look at their parts in here. Do we need to add something take something away, change something. And if there are other issues that come up, and then I will work with Amron. Oh, and commissioner. I'm going to work with Amron also over the until Jen, you know, to get make sure that we have something by January and then, and when Amron gets it into some kind of shape that isn't final but is presentable. Then I'll see if anybody else on the committee wants to co-sponsor, and we'll have a bill by the first day when we come back in January. That sounds great. Unless there's an objection I think will the starting point would be the committee's last draft and will work from there. Yeah, and there were a couple things in here that Tony brought up that just to make some clarifications in the language and go through it and see what other changes. I don't know if we ever changed our the name of our what I had suggested unfortunately as a community relations office and the suggestion that I've heard from my constituents is community engagement. I don't know if that's in here or not but we'll make sure that that gets in here with some language. Right. Okay. Thank you all. Well, I'm going to apologize for my what turned out to be in this case my lack of planning skills and not getting this done earlier but I think that we're in a much better place than if we had tried to pass something earlier I think that we're end up with much more support. In the grand timeline of the agency of public safety discussion the last five months is a drop in the 51 year bucket. Exactly that. Okay. All right. Okay. And unless anybody else has anything they're dying to say, I think, can the committee stay on for just a little while. Sure. Thank you.


Fy enw i'n edrych am ymddangos, mae Mary Abed-Ahad oedd ymwyloedd St Andrews, mae'n schyffordi gyda hwnnw i'r gwaith yn ystod yn cyflawni gyda hwnnw o'r University of St Andrews, a mae'n cyffiliadoddodd iddo'r hwnnw, a'r Max Planck Institute o'r Rhon Ùf yn Gyffredinolol yng Nghymru. Her work examines the effective air pollution and weather changes on health, mental health, well being, mortality and hospital admission in the general population and biathเอinnig subgroups. So today she's going to present some of that work and I'm going to hand over straight to Mary so that she can start her presentation, over to you. Thank you so much, Dar sensing for the introduction so I just came out here right now. Let's hope it works. So, gweithgwnaeth yng Nghymru, mae'n mynd i am hwnnw, ynddo i'r newid yma ar gyfer gyda'r gyfyniadau sy'n gynghwm ymwhiffydd Andrews, ac ydy'r gweithigol yma yn ymddangos cymdeithas ymddangos am ymgyrch ac ymwneud hynny'n gweithio y mynd yn gweithio ymgyrch ac mae hynny'n ddechrau eich gennyrch yn y Cymru, oherwydd mae'n gweithio'n ddynnal yma ar y Cymru, oherwydd mae'n gweithio'n ddynnal ymdano. First, I will give a general introduction about the topic. Mental health problems are noticeably rising globally, and this is causing serious socio-economic losses to the societies. According to Rigo et al in 2016, the global burden of mental diseases was estimated at 32% of years lived with disability, and 13% of disability adjusted life years. Mental health problems are a serious issue. Mental health disorders are mainly triggered by genetics and or by psychosocial risk factors. However, recent literature has been showing a relationship also between environmental factors including exposure to ambient air pollution and mental well-being. However, most of this evidence is still fragmented and inconclusive. So how does now air pollution affect mental well-being? So it can affect it either directly or indirectly. So it can affect it directly through biological mechanisms. So a particulate matter of small diameters, of small diameters such as PM1 or PM2.5 might initiate oxidative stress and lead to the formation of inflammatory cytokines that infiltrate the blood-brain barrier, causing neurodegeneration and neuroinflammation. Also particulate matter and nitrogen dioxide pollutants have been linked by observational research to increase traits of several depressive disorders and mental well-being disorders such as autism spectrum, schizophrenia, dementia, psychotic experiences, cognitive disabilities and anxiety. Also air pollution can affect mental well-being indirectly and this could be through the nuisance and individual coping behaviour to deal with this air pollution and nuisance caused by it. So some of the air pollutants can cause a static or odorous nuisance and this will inhibit psychological supporting outdoor activities due to air pollution and this in turn can lead to cognitive anxiety, stress, loneliness which leads to general fatigue and perceived symptoms of poor mental well-being. And in a recent systematic literature review of 178 published articles it was shown that air pollution is to degrees happiness and life satisfaction substantially and also to increase anxiety annoyance and mental problems and even suicide ideation and also it leads to coping approaches such as avoidance behaviour and migration to an area with less air pollutants. Also air pollution can lead to experiential anxiety emerging from worrying feelings about one's physical health and future. So because there is more conclusive research about the effect of air pollution on physical health including cardiopulmonary, immune system and cancer diseases, people who live in highly polluted areas might also experience stress and worrisome feelings of getting physical illness of this air pollution and this also will impact their mental well-being. So despite the establishment of linkages between air pollution and mental well-being in the literature, the results are still inconclusive. Most of the studies were cross-sectional or longitudinal studies that lack spatial temporal specificity and lengthy follow-up times. And to date no study has tried to address the association between long-term air pollution exposure and mental well-being using a within between longitudinal design which I will explain in a bit in the methods section. And published research also have not yet covered all population types and the potential moderating effect that demographic groups might have on this association between air pollution and mental well-being. For example, only age and gender social demographics are considered by most of the literature. However, ethnicity is not being considered in this topic. Therefore examining how the effect of air pollution on mental well-being varies by ethnic groups such as this can provide us with more conclusive results. So this study aims to assess longitudinality overall and the between within effects of long-term which is 11 years exposure to four air pollution nitrogen dioxide, sulfur dioxide and particulate matter of 10 and 2.5 diameters. In the UK on individuals reported mental well-being which was measured using the 12 items general health questioner scale. And also we aim to assess whether ethnic minorities such as Pakistani and Bangladeshi Indians, Black African Caribbean and other ethnicities and also non-UK born individuals if they suffer from a more pronounced risk for mental well-being with increasing concentrations of the four poll users. So methods we use data from the UK household longitudinal understanding the society data and we had a sample of 60,146 adult individuals who provided 349,748 repeated responses across 10 waves of data collection which is equivalent to 11 years from 1090 to 1019. And this individual level data was linked to yearly concentrations of the four poll using the local authority of residents for each individual. Later we took the air pollution concentration and we decomposed it into between and within effects. So the between effect is the average 11 years of air pollution for each local authority. Whereas the within effect it is the annual air pollution deviation from the 11 years average for each local authority. And then we examined the association between air pollution and self-reported mental well-being in the general population and also by ethnic groups using three levels multi-level mixed effect linear models adjusting for important social demographics, cigarette smoking and gear dumps. Just to note that mental well-being was assessed using the general health questioner which has 12 items that assess that capture non-psychotic psychiatric illness and these 12 questions relate to mental well-being of the interviewed individuals in the past few weeks preceding the data collection and responses for each of these 12 questions are assessed on a four-point-like scale and then they are dichotomized and then they are summed up which results in a general score for the mental well-being that ranges from 0 to 12 with higher scores indicating poorer mental well-being. Now we come to results. So this table shows descriptive statistics for the first wave of the understanding society data and for the last wave. So we can see that the majority of the sample are females. They belong to the middle-aged group from 34 to 58 years old and the majority are British white and the other ethnicities, they are approximately 4%. So for example, Pakistan and Bangladesh, they are 3.5% in wave 1 and 4.5% in wave 10 of this data. The majority were born in the UK at 6% and around 14% were not born in UK. 53% were married. Around one-third of the sample had university degree and one-third had high school degree and around 60% of individuals said that they are living comfortably slash doing alright with respect to their financial situation. Majority also were non-smokers and only around 20% were smokers. This graph here also shows the air pollution levels across years from 2009 to 2019 and we can see fluctuations, some fluctuations in the air pollution terms. However, we can notice that in general air pollution degrees in recent years. So if we compare for example on 2009 to 2019 we can see for all the pollutants the level now is less than it used before. So now we come to the multi-level regression model results and here we are showing the overall pollution effect as well as the between effect which shows us the spatial effect of air pollution like the effect of living in more polluted local authorities versus not and the within pollution effect which is more temporary so it shows how the variation in air pollution across time affects the well-being within each local authority. So we can see that the overall pollution has positive effect on mental well-being which means as the concentration of all of these four pollutants increases the mental well-being will become poorer and we see a similar picture for the between spatial effect of air pollution however for the within effect which is more temporary we didn't see any significant associations. Now there's a graph here it shows how this association vary between ethnic groups and generally we don't see any conclusive evidence that the association between air pollution and mental well-being varies by ethnic groups. So it's just related to Pakistani slash Bangladeshi they are showing poorer mental well-being with increasing concentrations of particulate matter 2.5 and sulfur dioxide and only also for non-UK born individuals however it's not very conclusive and also when we assess the between and within effects of air pollution also we don't see any conclusive evidence. So concluding remarks using longitudinal individual level and contextual linked data this study highlighted the negative effect of air pollution on individuals mental well-being over time so as the concentrations of air pollution increases mental well-being will become poorer and significant overall and between effects like spatial between effects are spatial between local authorities we're shown for all the four pollutants so this shows that if you live in a more polluted local authority you will experience poorer mental well-being however like fluctuation of air pollution across time doesn't affect your mental well-being so much and analysis by ethnicity didn't show conclusive evidence it just showed elevated scores of poor mental well-being with increasing concentrations just of sulphur dioxide and particulate matter only for one ethnic group which is Pakistani and Bangladeshi and non-UK born individuals but not for the other ethnic groups so environmental policies to reduce air pollution emissions can eventually improve the mental well-being of people in the UK however we didn't find any conclusive evidence on the moderating effect of ethnicity for future research we recommend data that can be used to link air pollution to individual level data at a finer spatial resolution level because here we use the local authority this is what was available for us with this data set however for future we will be using another data set which is the Scottish Longitudinal Study which allows linkages at the postcode level of air pollution rather than using the local authority so we are hoping to see more interesting results there so thank you so much for listening for my presentation today and this is my email address in case anybody have any questions later and I'm looking forward for the discussion and questions okay we're going to go to our next presentation now so our next presenter today is Sophie Baker from Banga University so Sophie is in the final year of her PhD she's funded by the ESRC and she is based at Banga University so she's interested in the social determinants of psychosis in minority groups with a particular focus on linguistic minorities and her PhD is looking at the mental health of linguistic minorities in Wales using both qualitative and quantitative methods so over to you Sophie good afternoon everyone my name is Sophie and I'm an ESRC funded PhD student at Banga University working under the supervision of Dr Chris Savill and Dr Mike Jackson so today I'm just going to take you through some preliminary findings of one of my PhD studies which uses National Survey for Wales data to examine group density associations for mental health in language, national identity and ethnic groups in Wales so I'll just begin with a bit of background so mental illness is not equally distributed throughout the population rather our risk of developing a mental illness varies substantially by social group and geographic area so this is not a novel finding a seminal work by Farrison Dunham and Odegard as far back as the 1930s found higher rates of psychiatric admissions in migrants to the United States two conflicting explanations stem from these findings Farrison Dunham proposed a social causation hypothesis suggesting that living in socially adverse neighbourhoods is what drives the increased risk while Odegard thought the higher rates in migrants were due to selective migration in other words individuals who are more vulnerable to developing a mental illness are more likely to migrate or drift into these more deprived areas before the onset of their illness so since these early studies there have been significant statistical advancements which makes it easier to disentangle the individual and area level variables associated with mental illness one well replicated epidemiological finding is that some ethnic minority and migrant groups have poorer mental health than their majority group counterparts however the extent of this risk is somewhat contingent on the immediate area in which the minority group individual lives for example ethnic or group density associations have found that minority group individuals have better mental health when they live in areas where their group is well represented compared to minorities living in areas with a low proportion of their own group there is some suggestion that low own group density areas do not pose the same risk across different minority groups and risk is particularly marked in black individuals and to date most group density studies have examined these kinds of associations in ethnic minority and migrant groups so there are in terms of mechanisms there are material and psychological reasons that might help to explain the poor mental health observed in some ethnic minority and migrant groups material processes refer to factors restricting an individual's access to resources networks and a voice to kind of gain control over their life and personal circumstances for example discriminatory behaviour or policy directed towards ethnic minorities that restricts their access to opportunities and resources and sustains an equal power balance between the minority and majority group psychological processes refer more to the mental consequences of belonging to a group that one perceives as lower status it is thought that ethnic minority in itself is not a risk factor for mental health rather belonging to a disempowered or marginalised group the evidence base is limited but some studies have found that these density relationships extend to other types of minorities such as those classified by political affiliation lower social class and sexual minority status to identify mechanisms involved in the group density effect it is therefore theoretically interesting to examine group differences in the effect including in minorities classified by other types of social characteristics language is quite interesting in this regard because language is different in terms of power and status and it's quite a salient marker of in group identity language can of course also present other more practical challenges for individuals who are not able to communicate in a widely spoken language in their local area which might pose problems we have accessed in social capital for example national identity is of interest because I guess it's kind of a classic us versus them variable it's also quite interesting in the sense that it's more of a flexible identity compared to ethnic group and language status so in short examining associations in these different types of groups can help provide clues as to the important social process involved in the risk of lower own group density areas Wales is a good social context within which to examine these group density effects so Welsh speaking ability is very socially salient in Wales Welsh is an official language of Wales but is only spoken by about 90% of the population however if we consider this at a smaller neighbourhood level Welsh speakers actually comprise the majority in many areas so most Welsh speakers are bilingual Welsh and English speakers so English speakers who do not speak Welsh are more likely to be linguistically isolated in their area in the sense of them not being able to communicate in a widely spoken language where they live these maps show units of geography at the lower super output level at the LSOA level which are units of geography comprising about 1500 people the map on the left shows more Welsh speaking areas in the darker blue colours so as you can see most Welsh speaking areas are situated in the west of the country but there is high variation in Welsh speaking when we look at this small neighbourhood level the second map indicates more Welsh identifying areas the proportions people selected that they have a Welsh national identity in the census so as you can see there's a lot of highly Welsh identifying areas and this is particularly high in the south of the country in Cardiff and in the south Wales valleys the third map shows the geographical distribution of non-white British ethnic minorities and the fourth map indicates area deprivation as measured by the Welsh index of deprivation so the darker colours on the map indicate higher levels of deprivation so many group density studies are conducted in large urban cities often in England and the Netherlands so Wales is quite a different study setting it's more rural and for example if we were to look at these kinds of density effects in London for example ethnic minority position and linguistic minority status perhaps more conflated so given that it seems plausible that mechanisms involved in the ethnic density effect might extend to other types of identities we expect to see group density associations for all three identity types we expect to see a group density relationship for ethnic minorities in line with many previous studies but we also expect these effects to extend to language and national identity so for our data set we obtained a licence from the Welsh Government to obtain the LSOAs for individual respondents this was merged with area level data from the 2011 UK census we combined the data from the 2012 to 13 13 to 14 and 14 to 15 waves of survey so we had a sample size of 28,248 people we derived a continuous mental health dependent variable from a factor analysis of four mental health related outcomes in the surveys so as an example for the anxiety variable respondents were asked to rate how anxious they felt yesterday on a 10 point scale for our analysis we used the GLM TMB package in R we fitted mixed effects models to test the presence of group density associations for each of three identity types so the first model comprised of the interaction between the individual and the area level variable as fixed effects, for example the interaction between Welsh speaking status and the LSOA level proportion of Welsh speakers the basic model also included sampling weights from the survey and a random intercept to account for nesting within the different LSOAs the full models are adjusted for all individual and area level covariance that are outlined here so in terms of our results at the individual level proficient Welsh speakers were defined as individuals who specified that they were proficient in Welsh or could speak a fair amount of Welsh and everyone else was coded as a normal speaker there were 4361 proficient Welsh speakers in the sample and the rest were non Welsh speakers so just on the left on the regression plot here you can see proficient Welsh speakers are the blue line and non Welsh speakers are the red line so as you can see the more Welsh speaking areas were associated with better mental health for both groups which isn't expected because we didn't expect to see this in the non Welsh speakers in more Welsh speaking areas the forest plot on the right is a visualisation of the fully adjusted mix effects model so the purple indicates variables with a protective relationship of mental health and the green indicates detrimental associations so as you can see the fully adjusted model indicated a significant main effect of area level Welsh speaking such that the more Welsh speaking areas were associated with better mental health however inconsistent with our hypothesis we found no evidence of an interaction between individual level Welsh speaking status and the area level proportion of Welsh speaking speakers after adjustment for covariates that's just circled at the bottom here as for national identity nearly 18,000 people indicated that they had Welsh national identity and no Welsh national identity so again on the plot on the left people with a Welsh national identity are the blue line and no Welsh national identity is the red line so more Welsh identifying areas were associated with poor mental health however after adjusting for the covariates in the full model there was no main effect of area level national identity and no evidence of an interaction between individual national identity so again inconsistent with our hypothesis we found no indication of a group density association for national identity for these preliminary analysis we conducted quite a crude group density analysis for ethnic groups in Wales so we examined the association between ethnic group and area level proportion of non-white British ethnic minorities just to say you've got two minutes left so the ethnic minority samples were small so there was the biggest group was white although with 588 people then there was 277 Asian individuals 150 with a mixed ethnic background 90 from another ethnic background group and 77 black individuals so as you can see mental health sharply decreases as ethnic density increases in the white British group in the ethnic minority groups there seems to be a protective association in black individuals but the relationships seem to vary more for the other groups again on the right we can see the fully adjusted model so more highly ethnic density areas were associated with poor mental health but then when we looked at the association between individual level ethnic minority status and area level ethnic density for all ethnic groups and significantly so for white of the black and Asian groups which is consistent with our hypothesis so we found no evidence of a group density association for language and national identity but we did find evidence of an association for ethnic groups so just in terms of some strengths and limitations overall we had a large sample size and these associations in language is novel as far as I know other studies have looked at this in terms of limitations some of our variables potentially have poor reliability and validity for example our mental health variable also there's small ethnic minority sample sizes and the ethnic density analysis was quite crude but these are preliminary analyses and will conduct more granular analysis in future so just to conclude in these preliminary findings we found an effect for ethnic minorities but not for language or national identity in Wales I think these are quite interesting no findings because we did expect that associations would extend to these groups so like I said the studies in its early stages so I'm keen to get into that these analyses were exploratory so in future we'll be conducting analyses on more recent ways of the national survey for Wales and these data include a clinical mental health variable that we can use and finally with survey data of course you're limited by the questions asked in the survey so another of my PhD studies involves a qualitatively interviewing individuals with psychosis in low own linguistic density areas and I also hope to conduct these analyses using a more psychosis related outcome because we might see that these kinds of associations are more likely to be observed for psychosis because there is a degree of specificity to psychosis compared to more common mental health problems okay and that's everything thank you very much for listening and does anybody have any questions okay everyone we're going to go to the final presentation from today from today's panel so this is a recording presentation and it is by Ji Yong Siw from University College London Ji Yong moved to the UK in 2017 and she's going to graduate from her undergraduate degree in population health at UCL so congratulations to Ji Yong she's interested in equality, inclusion and diversity and social everyday reality and is keen to study further emerging health issues caused by poverty and inequality in public health and international development and she is going to start studying for an MSc from this autumn hello I'm Ji Yong Siw and today I'm going to introduce my dissertation project to examine whether there is an association between changing neighbourhood ethnic density and individual mental health in the UK this presentation is constructed with four main sections first I'll explain the ethnic density which is a fundamental CC service that we should look at before listening to my project I'll explain the UK household longitudinal study UK HLS and study methods that are selected for this project then we will look at the findings and interpretation of the outcomes then finally I will discuss some strengths and limitations of the studies and the points that future studies need to focus on so I will start with what is ethnic density and its related CCs ethnic density is defined differently depending on the research but we use the general term which shows the proportion of ethnic minority groups in a neighbourhood ethnic minority groups in the UK are more likely to be exposed to greater risk of health including both physical and mental health but this ethnic density suggested interesting outcomes that greater density in a neighbourhood can provide protective or positive impact on health outcomes this is quite a new concept but some of the UK-based studies have tested and supported the positive impacts of greater density on mental health particularly in those from Indian and Pakistani backgrounds so this study tests whether the positive impact are also applied when we look at the change in ethnic density between two different time points as a predictor variable and based on the excessive research the mechanism was developed as ethnic density in a neighbourhood might provide ethnic minority to have stronger social cohesion and support or the sense of community by sharing their cultural, religious and linguistic values and this kind of environment might also reduce or prevent the racial discrimination or low status stigma in this neighbourhood against ethnic minority compared to neighbourhood with low proportion of ethnic minority which also have positive or protective impacts on mental health and their wellbeing the study was designed to test full main hypothesis the first hypothesis was increasing ethnic density in a neighbourhood is associated with better mental health the second hypothesis is the positive impacts of increased density are greater for non-white groups than white ethnic groups this will be because ethnic minority has stronger social cohesion with the same ethnic groups or other ethnic groups as found by previous studies and this is tested in the third hypothesis which is the greater impacts of increased density for non-white groups are moderated by better social cohesion the last hypothesis was the positive impact of increased density is greater for living in less deprived neighbourhood and this test whether the magnitude of positive impact are different depending on neighbourhood deprivation levels which is another environmental condition that might affect mental health this study mainly used the UK household longitudinal study UKHLS which is an annual household survey started in 2009 to 2010 using over 40,000 UK households this provides high quality multidisciplinary data on health, socio-economic status and social life and the UKHLS households are selected through a two-stage cluster random sampling and all household members become a part of the samples the study data was taken from Wave 9 which was collected in 2017-19 from more than 24,000 households and a special licence was applied to access the UKHLS data and access to data was under restrictive conditions this data was combined with 2001-2011 census data which were used to calculate the acid density and neighbourhood deprivation and these were combined using the lower level super-upper area codes the outcome variable in the study was mental health and this was measured by general health questionnaire 12 GHQ12 was a validated screening tool for minor psychiatric immobility and a good proxy measure for depressive disorder and general population and non-clinical setting I used the total score of GHQ12 where higher value represents worse mental health the predictor variable was to change the acid density between 2001 and 2011 and as mentioned before this was measured using the census data on a lower level covariates are the variables that are also able to affect mental health so I included neighbourhood deprivation and this was measured by the Townsend deprivation index which was widely used in health research and calculated by aggregating standardised values of full deprivation indicators I also added social cohesion which was measured by instrument and this compromises of attraction to the neighbourhood neighbouring and psychological sense of community then I included age, sex, ethnicity monthly gross income, highest qualification and living areas multi-level modelling was used because individuals in the UK are nested within household and neighbourhood but household level was excluded in this analysis because around half of households represent only one individual and there was statistical evidence of no significant difference on mental health between individual and household levels I will now proceed to present the findings from this project Between 2001 and 2011 we can find evidence of England and Wales have become more ethnically diverse and dense 92% of neighbourhoods experience an increase in the proportion of ethnic minority and the average increase across all neighbourhood was 6.4% The previous findings show that ethnic minority groups concentrated in more deprived neighbourhood but as you can see in this box plot the greatest increase was also reported in the most deprived neighbourhood which is coloured in purple in this plot This might mean that ethnic minority density was already high in the most deprived neighbourhood and it increased the most over the 10 years This table compared the outcomes of 5 multi-level regression models and please post a recording here if you would like to take a look at the results and I will go over them on the next slide Through the project we can find that increased ethnic density was initially associated with better mental health and non-white groups as we hypothesised but we found worse mental health in white ethnic groups but when the model considered neighbourhood deprivation variable the positive impacts for non-white groups were no longer statistically significant This might be because non-white groups concentrated in more deprived neighbourhood so controlling neighbourhood deprivation variable might result in weak statistical power to detect an effect across different neighbourhood deprivation levels or another explanation might be that people in deprived neighbourhood have exposed the greater density before the research as we are looking at the change in ethnic density on mental health rather than just higher density at one point When we added the interaction between change in density and social cohesion the increase in ethnic density was associated with better mental health for white ethnic groups but not for non-white groups So a marginal effects analysis we can find that white ethnic groups have positive impacts when they keep low or moderate social cohesion with neighbours but there are adverse impacts when social cohesion is higher than a certain point These findings might reflect the difficulty of disentangling the density effects as another study showed but it might also reflect the fact that the increase in ethnic density of non-white groups might not be homogeneous but maybe in fact the variety of ethnic minority groups entering the area who could have weak social interaction between themselves Moving on from the results I will briefly touch on the strengths and limitations of the project One of the main strengths of this project was that there are two nationally representative sources UK, Chalas and Senses These have large sample size across different age, socio-economic status and ethnic minority groups and this is expected to produce valid and reliable results The project also used a change in ethnic density over time to show stronger association of ethnic density effects and mental health and to my knowledge there has been no project considered relevant neighbourhood characteristics including residential mobility or ethnic density change over time This helps overcome the temporality of neighbourhood effects on health by measuring exposures over a longer duration Lastly, this project used less distinctive categories of ethnic groups when calculating density change because we used the proportion of ethnic minority rather than focusing on a specific ethnic group I believe this increased validity of the results to a broader set of ethnic minorities than focusing on a specific group and also reflects the changing view of general population regarding the ethnicity There were some limitations in this study Firstly, we didn't consider the initial level of ethnic density levels but focus on the change in ethnic density Secondly, it was also difficult to detect the direction of causality because the data was still coming from cross-sectional study Lastly, although this is a minor problem as UKHLS has a large sample size but some data was excluded when the data was processed especially because I used the complicated cases In conclusion, the increased ethnic density and neighbourhood deprivation were not important because there were many mental health using existing UKHLS data In this study, social cohesion was known as a potential mediator that partially linked increased density and mental health for white ethnic groups but this still did not directly explain the density change effect because high level of social cohesion was found to have poor mental health This study was also unable to find the association and any meaningful mediator or moderator for non-white groups So, a future study needs to verify the findings in this study using other study data or measures and we might need to test other confounding factors including exposure to diverse culture and reduce low status stigma But I believe that this kind of study will have a fundamental impact on health especially in implementing more cost-effective and efficient health interventions because it examines the neighbourhood effect which is often overlooked in favour of individual risk Thank you very much for your time and please let me know if you have any questions


Hollywood couple Shawn Mendes and Camila Cabello had quite the scary experiences last week at their Los Angeles property. The two were actually home when burglars broke into the residence through a window. While the criminals made a speedy exit, once they realized Shawn and Camila were home, they grabbed the keys to one of Shawn's cars on the way out. And he's down a G-Wagon. But at least the couple is safe. The pair has been pretty inseparable for a couple years now and have been living and spending quarantine in LA in the luxury house Camila bought in 2019. If they ever feel the need for a change of scenery, Shawn still owns some real estate in his native Canada. Today, we'll check them out. 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. Shawn Mendes is a Canadian singer, songwriter and more, who first rose to fame posting song covers to the now extinct video-sharing app Vine. After the world heard his range of vocal talent, the next stop was Stardom. In his other half, Camila Cabello is a Cuban-American singer, songwriter and actress. And while she started off as a member of the girl group Fifth Harmony, I think we can all agree she's found considerably more success as a solo artist. Her debut album was number one on the Billboard charts and her songs have been proven fan favorites much like her boo Shawn. Over the last couple years, it's reported that Shawn has earned close to $90 million, a lot of which was from his 2019 world tour. And while he hasn't been able to tour due to the pandemic, he's still earned himself an estimated net worth of about $40 million or more. Camila is also super successful in her own right with a net worth of about $14 million. And let's not forget the 3,500 square foot mansion to her name in the Hollywood Hills.  Be sure to hit that subscribe button around that bell, we post a new video daily. In this video, we're going to check out the gorgeous estate that Camila Cabello and Shawn Mendes call home in LA as well as Shawn's Toronto condo. Like I said, as usual, I'm not giving you guys the addresses so after that scary robbery we won't be putting your favorite singing duo in any more danger. On this channel we talk about celebrity houses but if you want to know about their other lavish purchases, go subscribe to Famous Fashion where myself and some other hosts are reporting on all things celebrity fashion, expensive items and more. A couple ended up calling off their engagement before even making it down the aisle and split in 2003 but the memory of the pink diamond lives on. As always, don't forget to follow me on Instagram to chat and now let's get into this video. While we all know Camila hails from Cuba and half of her heart still remains in Havana in 2019, the pop star put down some roots in Hollywood. While she often visits her family back in Florida where she grew up, it only makes sense that she lives close to the action and other celebrity folk. Her Mediterranean style villa costs her about $3.4 million and it's located in the heart of town, in the leafy streets of the Hollywood Hills and just above the sunset strip. Neighbors in the area include the likes of Queen drummer Roger Taylor, singer Adam Lambert and more. While Camila bought the home before she started dating Shawn, it wasn't long before the couple moved in together and it seems the worldwide pandemic made them closer than ever. With the home's interior spinning 3,570 square feet, I think it would be a little big for just one person anyways. Camila and Shawn's Hollywood house was originally built in 1977 but has underwent multiple remodels in the many years since and Camila purchased the home from Bollywood star Yude Chopra. The villa sits somewhat close to the street but still offers perfect privacy with most of the front of the home, aside from the two car garage hidden behind tall trees. Not to mention, a fully gated and camera watched courtyard also protects the home's glass front door but it seems all of that wasn't quite enough to stop the burglars. Once inside the couple's home, the foyer boasts sand colored tiles and nearby there's a sunken family room with fireplace and hardwood flooring. The kitchen has been fully updated and redone recently and is full of the latest stainless steel appliances, bar style seating and a ton of natural light. The formal dining room with large arched windows is attached to the space and elsewhere. The home has 4 bedrooms and 4 baths. Some of the common spaces, the floor to ceiling glass sliders, completely tuck away to blend the indoors with the outdoors, making the backyard seem larger than it is. One sitting room in particular opens right up to the poolside so close you could jump right in. The bedrooms are plush and while all guest rooms upstairs are en suite, the most impressive is the master. Shawn and Camila's retreat boasts hardwood floors, a fireplace and a bathroom with dual vanities and a soaking tub. The fourth bedroom is technically a spare room and could be used for an office if one prefers. Finally, while the yard is cozy and not very large, whoever designed it made sure to maximize use of the space. Outside, there is both a fire pit and a separate fireplace lounge, as well as a dining area and of course, a saltwater plunge pool. Privacy extends to the backyard as it's surrounded by high walls and leafy hedges and vines. On the other hand, Shawn has long owned a condo in the heart of downtown Toronto for years now. While he hails from an area outside the major city, Pickering, Ontario, it seems that when he made it big, he treated himself to a luxe condo closer to the action. The star has been pretty private about his home in Toronto and for a long time fans had zero idea as to what the place looked like. All we kind of had an idea of was that Shawn had the signature views from the six light drake hat. Of course, the famous CN Tower. More recently, the account Any Homes showed the Pickering native's luxury apartment in downtown Toronto which boasts 1,144 square feet of space as well as three beds and two baths. In Shawn's Netflix documentary Shawn Mendes in Wonder, the interior of the home is also shown briefly and the singer claims the landscape outside is the best view he's seen in the city, which is also likely the reason he hasn't upgraded to a bigger property in Canada since. While Shawn could definitely afford an even more expensive and bigger place, his condo is far from basic. He reportedly bought the property back in 2017 for 1.75 million dollars and likely pays about 1,100 dollars per month in maintenance fees and the like on top of that. This comes with other perks though like two heated parking spots which you'll need if you're in Canada. Shawn has shown peaks of his condo over the years and on Instagram and Facebook but knowing more of the details now we can see how stunning it really is. His condo was built in 2011 and sold to the first owner in October but Shawn was able to snag it next. The building is centrally located and does provide one of the best views in the city. The exact location hasn't been revealed in order to preserve Shawn's privacy. Aside from the indoor square footage, the penthouse boasts an additional 750 square foot terrace overlooking that CN Tower view and the Rogers Centre. In his unit, one bedroom has direct access to the sprawling terrace and what the video calls a decent-sized closet. While Shawn's kitchen isn't exceptionally large, it has all you need to cook up a meal including granite stone countertops and dark wooden cabinets with a fridge that blends into the cabinets as well. The nearby dining area can fit up to six guests at the dinner table and the space is complete with a chandelier and room to move around. His open-concept condo also flows into the living room where you'll find floor to ceiling windows to soak up that city view. Another guest room faces the Rogers Centre which is right across from Shawn's master suite. When the star couple stays in Toronto, they can enjoy a walk-in closet and more floor to ceiling windows with stunning views from the master. While the en suite has dual vanities, a massive soaking tub and separate rainfall shower. The building itself offers a comfy lounge area and a handful of other amenities like a private gym just down the hall from Shawn. While the pair has been shacking up in LA for the most part, Shawn and Camila did spend some time at the downtown condo with their pup Tarzan after spending Christmas with Shawn's family in Pickering. And it seems like they enjoy it here too but with a luxury condo like that, who wouldn't? Alright so it's time for me to wrap up this house tour. After checking out Shawn, Mendez and Camila Cabello's homes, what did you guys think? While the pair spends most of their days at the LA estate Camila bought back in 2019, they still have Shawn's Toronto condo to escape to should the mood strike. Out of their two properties, which would you rather live at? Or what were your favourite features of the place? I'm not one for living in a sky rise personally, it just doesn't seem homey enough but it definitely makes for a stunning getaway spot. Be sure to rate Shawn and Camila's properties down in the comments. If you haven't, I'd love it if you subscribe to my personal channel if you want to get to know me better. I'll link you to my latest video and I post one every Sunday. We are staying at the Fairmonts of Banff Spring, but when we arrived, I was even more excited to find out the place is haunted. Thanks for watching, don't forget to follow me on Instagram and I will see you all in the next video. Bye!


During the Roman conquest of Britannia, modern-day Wales provided fertile ground for Celtic resistance to the advancing Roman legions. In a previous video, I have documented how the Saluris tribe of ancient Wales fought fiercely against the Imperial Eagle, yet they were not alone, as two other major groups resisted Roman rule on the battlegrounds of modern-day Wales. The first group that we are going to look at are the Druids, the mysterious and fascinating Celtic priesthood that held considerable power in ancient times. During the Golden Age of Celtic Civilisation, the Druids played a religious, legal, ritualistic and educational role. They were also philosophers and were said to have had ancient knowledge about the natural world as well as the gods, for one to have become a Druid. It was not uncommon to spend 20 years in training, with Julius Caesar writing in his time that the Druids were often educated in Britannia. The Druids enjoyed many advantages in Celtic societies, including being exempt from military service and not paying taxes like other citizens did. Furthermore, the Druids tightly guarded the secrets of their order, preferring to speak and memorise their knowledge rather than to write it down. This practice in part explains why very little written documents exist from ancient Celtic societies, which is frustrating from the perspective of studying history. This has meant that a lot of the primary societies from the Golden Age of the Celts were written by Roman or Greek sources, which are hardly impartial sources, particularly given that Caesar, one of the chief sources for the Celts, wrote about the Celts as he was bloodily conquering the home of Celtic civilisation, known as Gaul. On occasions when the Druids did have to write, they apparently used the Greek alphabet. When the Roman Empire invaded Britannia, Anglesey on the northwest corner of modern-day Wales was a Celtic stronghold and a major home of Druidism in Britannia. Furthermore, Anglesey became a major destination for British migrants who were fleeing from other parts of Britannia due to the Roman invasion, as the Roman historian Tacitus wrote about Anglesey, which the Romans referred to as the island of Monet. It had a powerful population and was a refuge for fugitives. Given this, it was a core target for the Romans, who went on to invade Anglesey twice, during the first Roman invasion of Anglesey in 60 AD, which was led by the Roman general Gaius Seutonius Paulinus. The Romans were met and initially startled, even scared, by the enigmatic Druids, as Tacitus wrote about the exchange. On the shore stood the opposing army with its denser ray of armed warriors, while between the ranks dashed women, in black attire like the Furies, with hair dishevelled waving brands, all around the Druids lifting up their hands to heaven, and pouring forth dreadful implications, scared their soldiers by the unfamiliar sight, so that, as if their limbs were paralysed, they stood motionless and exposed to wounds, then urged by their general's appeals and mutual encouragement not to quail before a trope of frenzied women. They bore the standards onwards, smote down all resistance, and wrapped the foe in the flames of his own brands. A force was next set over the Concorde, and their groves, devoted to inhumane superstitions, were destroyed. This initial invasion was halted, however, when Boudicca rebelled on the east coast of Britannia, forcing the Roman troops in Anglesey to march straight for Lindenium to head off Boudicca, almost two decades later in 77 A.D. The second Roman invasion of Anglesey took place under the Roman governor of Britannia, Gainus Julius Agricola. The Romans were successful in this campaign, and Anglesey was brought under Roman control. The other major ancient Welsh group, the resisted Roman rule that we are going to focus on, was the northern Welsh tribe known as the Ordovishies, who were active since early on in the Roman invasion of Wales. The Romans had initially invaded Wales for a few reasons. Firstly, Wales was home to mineral deposits, including gold, copper and lead. Secondly, Rome was responding to raids against their allies in other parts of Britannia. An early Roman campaign in Wales came around 48 A.D., after a Roman ally in England was attacked by the Celtic tribe of the D'Singley, who inhabited northeast Wales. In response, the Romans attacked the tribe, although we know little of the precise details of this campaign. In the initial period, when Rome invaded Wales, Caracticus, also known as Caradoc, served as a major leader of the rebellion, utilising guerrilla warfare tactics. When the Roman Empire first invaded the lands of modern England, Caracticus, who was the king of the Trinivantes tribe around Essex and the greater London area today, initially fled west to the territory of the Solorys to stir up resistance after defeat in battle. From around 48 A.D., the Solorys fiercely resisted Roman conquest. After a few years, however, Caracticus moved north to link up with the Ordovishis tribe. He served as a warlord of the Ordovishis for a period and fought the Romans for years. Even decades after Caracticus was captured and sent to Rome in 51 A.D., the Ordovishis continued to rebel. As late as 70 A.D., the Ordovishis once again rose up and revolt against Roman rule, destroying nearly the whole of a squadron of Allied cavalry quartered in their territory. This provoked a strong Roman response, led by Agricola. As the Roman historian Tacitus wrote, he collected a force of veterans and a small body of exiliaries, then as the Ordovishis would not venture the descent into the plain, he put himself in front of the ranks to inspire all with the same courage against a common danger, and led his troops up a hill. The tribe was all but exterminated. It seems that the Ordovishis at least suffered heavy defeats against Rome, but they may not have been fully conquered. A mosaic map in the Forum in Rome that shows the territory of the Roman Empire does not include the Northwest Tribal lands of the Ordovishis, indicating that they may not have been fully conquered by the Roman Empire. In general, however, Rome went on to control at least the majority of Wales until around 383 AD, yet they had to overcome fierce and persistent resistance in order to do so. Thanks for watching. Please subscribe and hit the bell to turn on notifications. 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