After George Floyd’s murder two years ago, Pierre Morton felt hopeless, angry and fearful. As protests erupted nationwide, he wasn’t sure they would lead to real change.
“What I can tell you is that it was a feeling of no matter what, voices that have not normally been heard will be heard,” Morton, a Keene resident who serves as Franklin Pierce University’s chief diversity officer, said in a recent interview.
On the night of Aug. 19, 2021, Torres, 40, was among a group of people police describe as in a near-riot state. On the pavement, covered by a tarp, was 67-year-old Beverly Avery, a Hispanic woman who was struck and killed by a motorist. (The identity of that driver still has not been released by police who only will say he is 22-years-old and from Bedford. Chief Allen D. Aldenberg said the results of the investigation are with the Hillsborough County Attorney’s Office who will decide how to proceed.)
In a new lawsuit, the ACLU of New Hampshire accuses the New Hampshire State Police of wrongly shielding the misconduct records of a former state trooper related to a 2017 vehicle-stop.
In that case, a Maine woman, Robyn White, was falsely accused of having drugs on her person when she was taken into custody. She was held for 13 days, before an invasive body-cavity search confirmed she did not possess any drugs.
Undeclared voters have had a say in New Hampshire’s primary elections for over 100 years, but one bill would change that.
While the current system allows New Hampshire’s roughly 410,000 undeclared voters to decide on election day which party’s primary they want to vote in, HB 1166 would require voters to declare a party affiliation at least four months in advance.
With voting rights hovering at the forefront of national conversations following the 2020 presidential election, bills to ease, restrict or otherwise alter the voting process have been in the spotlight of state legislatures across the country. This year, New Hampshire lawmakers enacted a handful of voting related legislation, including clarifying absentee ballot requirements for people in jail as well as centralizing the process for reporting voter address changes.
The Granite State’s next legislative session is just weeks away. Here is a look at eight election bills headed to the State House concerning voter fraud, absentee voting, age requirements and more.
The state Commission on Native American Affairs hasn't had enough members to officially vote for more than five months, in part because the group hasn’t had a new public member appointed by Gov. Chris Sununu in two years.
The Commission lost four members whose terms ended this year and who chose not to reapply. The body now has six people, and it needs nine to reach a quorum — the minimum number of people needed to vote. That means the body can’t make decisions, such as accepting draft language of legislation and sending letters to express the views of the Commission.
“Stories challenge us to be more human, more loving, more respectful, more forgiving, more compassionate. To take courage, to have a greater sense of humility and generosity of spirit despite what has happened in our past,” Profeit-LeBlanc said at New Hampshire’s annual indigenous storytelling festival Saturday.
The state’s Police Standards and Training Council is one of the organizations that came under scrutiny and increased public interest following last year’s police killing of George Floyd, which sparked a nationwide movement to review policing structures and policies.
In New Hampshire, that movement chiefly came in the form of the governor’s police accountability commission, which released 48 recommendations to improve policing, nearly half of which directly reference the standards and training council.
On Tuesday, the Portsmouth Police Commission voted unanimously to have the city’s police department start collecting data on every police stop of a civilian — not just those that result in a written warning, citation or arrest.
The decision comes after a proposal to require similar data collection by all police departments in New Hampshire failed in the State House earlier this year.
Darnell Hill was driving down Route 202 around midnight last August when he was pulled over for speeding.
During the stop, Officer Luis Berdecia of the Henniker Police Department, told Hill that he had another car to pull over. He instructed Hill to follow him. Hill, who is Black, was to pull over once they caught up to the second car.
“We’re here as part of this Indigenous Day not to celebrate us, because we celebrate our people all the time, it’s to educate,” Stevens said. “It’s to be here for the public so they get to see us. People fear what they don’t understand, and when they don’t understand it, sometimes hate comes from that.”
While the decision of whether or not to vaccinate is often characterized in partisan political terms, there’s a group of people who are hesitant to get the shot for reasons entirely unrelated to politics.
It could be a lack of information, vague fears or generalized pushback on demands that they do something they’d rather not do.
After efforts to change the ‘Red Raider’ mascot at Spaulding High School were shot down by the Rochester School Board last September, Connor Lempke did not give up. Instead, the rising senior decided to take the issue all the way to the state legislature.
“I want our school to be an environment where everyone from every background can be accepted and not have to look at something that they see as a caricature of themselves,” Lempke said.
As calls for police reform have intensified, one popular response has been to equip more officers with body cameras.
The idea is that increased monitoring of officers will deter misconduct and make it easier to discover and punish when it does happen. Body cameras have support from a broad range of stakeholders — if not always for the same reasons — including many police officials and activists.
Both Sununu’s administration and reform advocates said the new laws represent a significant step forward in police misconduct transparency, like publishing the state’s “Laurie List” of officers with credibility issues and opening police disciplinary hearings to the public. But critics said the legislature effectively “gutted” one of the bills, removing key provisions such as demographic data collection and mandatory implicit bias training for judges.
Gathered together at Hope for Recovery in Manchester recently, a dozen activists began assembling a quilt. On each patch, they plan to carefully stitch the name of a woman incarcerated in New Hampshire seeking clemency.
“I know how it feels when you’re in there and somebody says your name,” Danielle Metz, an organizer with the National Council for Incarcerated & Formerly Incarcerated Women & Girls, said. “That’s what’s going to give them hope.”
Despite the land’s bloody past, talk between Abenaki tribe leaders and descendants of Hannah Duston was friendly and productive this week under the watchful, granite eyes of Duston herself.
“We want to be one of the first parks in the country that shows we can work together and we can create an inclusive environment,” Denise Pouliot of the Cowasuck Band of the Pennacook Abenaki People said Wednesday. “We want an inclusive environment even after something as horrific as what happened. Time can move forward. We don’t live there anymore.”
