BURLINGTON — The mayor and police chief both describe the challenges presented by opiates as grave but “manageable” within the city.
Emergency calls reporting overdoses were up 103 percent in 2015 over the three-year average from 2012 to 2014, and ancillary drug crimes, such as retail theft and robberies, are also on the rise, according to figures from the Burlington Police Department.
“It’s not this overwhelming tidal wave of a problem. It’s serious and it’s growing and it’s hurting lives, but it’s manageable on the scale of the city,” Police Chief Brandon del Pozo said during a presentation at Monday’s City Council meeting.
Mayor Miro Weinberger asked the chief to report on the opiate problem and possible solutions when del Pozo took over the job in September. City councilors passed a resolution calling for an examination of possible solutions shortly after, and Monday’s presentation was a response to both.
What makes the crisis manageable is that drug activity is concentrated in the Old North End and is largely being driven by a few dozen people, many of whom are known to police, del Pozo said. “We’re talking about 15 to 20 square blocks that are really driving the calls for service of heroin and citizens asking us for help,” he said.
Del Pozo said he wants to increase the police presence in that neighborhood, but he said a proposal from city councilors to put a police substation on North Street isn’t the way to do that. He wants officers out on the street “disrupting the open air drug trade,” not tethered to a new police building. He suggested increasing foot and bike patrols in the area.
To sustain that increased presence, the chief said he’s planning to seek City Council approval to “overhire” in order to maintain a force of 100 officers, the current number of approved positions. Over the last several years the number of officers has hovered in the low 90s because of attrition, del Pozo said.
“I want to see if we can get that (approved) before I ask the taxpayers for more money to go above 100,” he said.
Police are working to target drug dealers who are motivated by profit, not those who are selling just to pay for their addiction, del Pozo said. City Councilor Selene Colburn, P-Eastern District, asked the chief to better define the distinction between the two.
Del Pozo acknowledged that police and prosecutors need to make those distinctions on a case-by-case basis. But in instances where people who aren’t from Burlington come here to sell drugs, and then leave with money and sometimes guns, they clearly fall into the category of profiteers, he said.
Asked by another councilor how Burlington police would avoid the racial disparity in drug arrests and convictions that has plagued much of the U.S., del Pozo highlighted the recent case of a suspected drug dealer killed during a raid, noting he was white.
There’s “remarkable” diversity in Burlington’s drug trade, which would make racial profiling ineffective, he said. “We do live with the fact that when drugs are pipelined from, for example, New York City … a lot of the criminal gangs that deal drugs up north are composed of, for example, African-Americans, but to say that they’re fueling the drug trade is just not true. It’s fueled by everyone up here,” he said.
Reducing the demand for heroin in Burlington can’t be accomplished with a police response, del Pozo said, echoing many state officials, including the governor, by calling for a public health offensive aimed at treating addiction as well.
“We’re not trying to incarcerate or arrest our way out of this problem,” he said.
Del Pozo would like to adopt a model pioneered by police in Gloucester, Massachusetts, where addicts who come to police attention are referred to drug treatment. But a waiting list for treatment at the only methadone clinic in northwestern Vermont makes that impossible in many instances, he said.
Bob Bick is CEO of Howard Center, which operates the Chittenden Clinic, the methadone clinic serving Chittenden, Franklin and Addison counties. He said there is a waiting list of more than 200 people.
“As bad as having 234 people on a waiting list sounds, it’s the lowest that it’s ever been since we opened (the clinic),” said Bick, who was joined at the council meeting by state Health Commissioner Harry Chen and Dr. John Brumsted, CEO of the University of Vermont Medical Center.
Brumsted said the hospital recently expanded services at an outpatient substance abuse clinic so it can accept stable patients from the Chittenden Clinic in hopes of freeing up capacity for those on the waiting list.
The outpatient clinic has 45 patients. Brumsted said it will scale up in the coming months to 100 patients on a rolling basis. The clinic will then help those patients find a primary care doctor to continue long-term addiction treatment.
Culturally there’s been a sea change among primary care doctors working for the medical center, Brumsted said, and they’ve become more willing to treat people with addiction.
As evidence of the shift, Brumsted said the hospital now has 25 primary care doctors credentialed to prescribe opiate maintenance drugs. That’s up from 14 in September.
