This is adopted from an Op-Ed I wrote in the Rutland Herald, August 18, 2020.    Hoyt Police Accountability Program In 2020 I ran for one of the Democratic nominations for State Senate from Rutland County, and as part of my campaign I devised a somewhat unique plan for active police accountability and that I now plan to bring to Montpelier to (hopefully) get enacted as State Representative, if elected.  In short, it involves setting up an agency to routinely (and randomly) review police body and dash cam footage to determine if officers are treating one group of people differently than another, and to ensure compliance with upholding the friendly, fair and non-biased policing so many departments aspire to. Just as highway crew members get randomly tested for drugs every so often, each week, different police officers could randomly have their prior week’s body/dash camera footage reviewed by trained specialists, to look for signs of bias or abuse. This could lead to specific training (or punishment) for officers who that are found to have issues, and to generally create an active accountability system for officers to ensure good and fair policing for all members of the community. This program would put officers on their best behavior, too, as they will know they are potentially being watched every second in the field, and serve as an invaluable training and oversight tool for police departments, in general. This would be a simple, relatively low-cost (maybe involving 8-10 new staffers at the state level), solution to a major issue we are confronted with today, and it would solicit active participation from groups such as the NAACP to ensure fairness and additional oversight.  And, just to put this program in perspective, the current cost to simply store the police body camera footage in Vermont is actually higher than my active police accountability plan would cost in its entirety. After all, how can we ever hope to actually ensure fairness and equality in the way police enforce the laws without some sort of active, ongoing, oversight from an independent and diverse body that actually knows what police officers are doing out in the field?  This program would provide for just that, and be a way for Vermont to once again lead the nation in ensuring justice and equality for all. It would also be bipartisan and fairly non- controversial in nature, I would expect, as it actually would help to rebuild public trust in, and improve the reputation of, police departments in the state over time, as officers could proudly state that they have been thoroughly vetted as being the best, and doing their job fairly and professionally.  So, win-win!

Practical Police Oversight For Racial Equality and Justice