[B]URLINGTON — Looking back on it, the new deputy chief of operations for the Burlington Police Department thinks casting directors were inadvertently sending him a message.
“All I ever played was a cop,” Jon Murad said. “Hollywood was trying to tell me something.”
During Murad’s acting career after college, he appeared as an “Intercom Guard” in the “X Files,” “Officer Russell” in one show and a “Young Officer” in another, according to IMDb.
But the Underhill native, who was sworn into the second top spot in Burlington PD on Oct. 18, would rather focus on his long career as an officer in the New York Police Department and his experience working as a top aide to former NYPD chief William Bratton.
He comes to the department from a lucrative private sector job working with Bratton for consultant Teneo Holdings, leading strategic and crisis communications campaigns and advising CEOs at large companies.
But Murad missed the public service that comes with policing and is happy to be back in uniform.
“I thought I could make a better contribution to the world if I were at the front lines of where people and cops and communities are coming together,” he said.
Early Life
Murad was born in Burlington and grew up on a dirt road in Underhill, the son of two professors at the University of Vermont. After graduating from Harvard in 1995, he moved to California to chase his dream of becoming an actor.
He had some minor roles in television series, but felt as if he was “treading the water of life” and wanted to have a greater impact. He moved to New York and worked for Newsweek magazine, but realized working in media wasn’t for him.
“I wanted something with a sense of more immediate consequence,” he said. “My brother is a surgeon and when he messes up at work, there are consequences, and I wanted a job a little bit like that.”
He said he felt a pivot in his life after 9/11. He was also inspired by the show “Band of Brothers” — a miniseries about a World War Two regiment — and a New Yorker article about the Myers Briggs Test, which explored if a test can really tell you who you are or if you have to go out and live your life to see who you are.
Around that time, he got back together with his college sweetheart, Vonnie, whom he later married.
NYPD career
In October 2004, he took the test to become a police officer and was hired by the NYPD in January 2005. He joined the NYPD’s Housing Bureau, which polices the city’s public housing projects.
He said becoming a housing officer fulfilled his desire for a higher level of interaction with the community. He worked in the housing project now known as the Sonia Sotomayor Houses.
“I worked in the Bronx and saw horrible things and wonderful things and troubling things,” he said. “And I had the opportunity to make an impact.”
Murad said a vast, vast majority of those living in the public housing were hardworking people trying to make ends meet. He viewed his role as trying to ensure that these people were able to live their lives in peace.
“You can have one knucklehead on a floor or even one knucklehead in a building who can really ruin it for everyone else, whether it’s because of the way they dispose of trash or noise or visitors, or sometimes turning into more criminal activity like drugs and robberies,” he said.
Murad, who became a cop at 32, moved up the ranks quickly and became a field intelligence officer. In that role, he worked on longer-term investigations, including one that lead to an indictment of around 20 of the most dangerous individuals in one of the Bronx’s housing projects.
He caught the attention of higher-ups in the NYPD when a department inspector came through his precinct and read a report in which Murad used the word “ostensibly.”
The department wanted Murad to join a unit it was setting up to do special investigations and policy development. The department had been paying contractors to do that work, but concluded these contractors did not fully understand the day-to-day realities of policing and would often make impractical suggestions.
With that unit, Murad helped create the NYPD’s Annual Firearms Discharge Report, which examined and analyzed officer-involved shootings. The report found that in 2007, there were 111 officer-involved shootings, 45 of which were at adversarial human targets — as opposed to accidental discharges, shooting at attacking animals, or cops getting involved in criminal activity themselves.
By 2015, the last year the NYPD did a stand-alone report before folding it into a wider report tracking all use of violence, there were 67 officer-involved shootings, 33 of which were at human adversaries.
“The lesson is that the very act of tracking behavior can change behavior,” he said. “And when you pair tracking with training and accountability, as the NYPD did more vigorously after the creation of the AFDR, you can change it even more, for the better.”
After working on the special unit, Murad wanted to get out of an office and get back on the street. He entered into a program at the Harvard University Kennedy School of Government in 2012 and got a master’s of public administration.
At the 2013 Harvard commencement, he delivered an address in which he said success was not about rising to the top, but about changing the world.
“My hope today is to remind us all, to assure us all that there is as much stature in our being social workers and teachers, soldiers and preachers, nurses and, yes, even cops, as in being presidents and poets laureate,” he said.
After graduating from Harvard for a second time in 2013, Murad returned to the NYPD and was assigned to be a supervisor in northern Manhattan. He also started putting his previous acting career to use, working as a technical consultant on Fox’s cop drama “Brooklyn Nine Nine.” Murad advised the series on how to make sure the police work the characters were doing was realistic.
When it became clear that Bill de Blasio was going to be elected mayor in 2013 and not keep Ray Kelly as his police commissioner, Murad was part of a team that wrote a paper that analyzed Kelly’s tenure and what changes needed to be made.
After de Blasio picked Bratton to be his police commissioner, Bratton made those who had worked on the paper analyzing Kelly top aides in the department. Shortly after, Bratton launched a collaborative process of re-engineering the department, which Murad worked on.
This process led to a greater emphasis on a community policing model in the city which aimed to improve the department’s relationship with its citizenry.
Bratton had seen Murad’s Harvard commencement address and brought Murad to work with him as a speech writer. Murad and Bratton became close, and Bratton promoted Murad to assistant commissioner, a rare six-rank promotion.
In that role, Murad advised the commission on strategic communications, strategy and policy development.
Murad’s NYPD communications work started in December 2014 and coincided with a fraught time for the department. His tenure overlapped with major protests of the department as part of the Black Lives Matter movement.
The protests about police brutality followed the death of Eric Garner in Staten Island earlier in 2014.
Murad said he believe the department handled the situation better than other departments in the country had handled similar police actions that resulted in the deaths of people of color.
“It was a wake-up call for the profession, and the NYPD navigated it in a way that has been exemplary,” he said. “Our crime is lower than it has ever been. Our arrests, enforcement for the sake of enforcement, is lower.”
Path back to Vermont
When Bratton stepped down from the NYPD in 2016, he took a job in the private sector and asked Murad to join him. As a consultant, Murad worked on projects including security for a major U.S. bank and with a Las Vegas entertainment company to step up their security following the mass killing in Las Vegas last year.
But he found himself with the same longing for public service that had inspired him to become an officer in the first place.
“It was important work, it was work that had value and it wasn’t as satisfying because it wasn’t for everyone,” he said.
Murad had always wanted to return to Vermont with his wife and two kids, 10-year old MacArthur and 7-year-old Cady Elizabeth, who are named after General Douglas MacArthur and suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton.
“Every time I’ve come home, my wife and I, since we’ve been married, we would look at each other as we drove down the road and hit Route 15 {in Underhill} in order to return to New York City and we would ask one another, ‘How do we get back here?’” he said.
So when the Burlington Police Department was looking for a new deputy chief, Murad jumped at the opportunity.
New Role with BPD
As the new deputy chief of operations, Murad will oversee the day-to-day functioning of the department, focusing on patrols. The other deputy chief, Jannine Wright, oversees the department’s administration and investigations.
While the population of Burlington, a city of just over 40,000, pales in comparison to the 8.6 million people who live in New York, Murad said policing everywhere shares a universal goal.
“The mission of policing is, which is very simple, prevent crime and disorder with community approval, that’s it,” he said. “It’s a pretty simple sentence, but it’s an incredibly complex role and incredibly complex task. And when you do it right, it is incredibly satisfying.”
And in Murad’s eyes, the BPD is doing a lot of things right. He said Mayor Miro Weinberger and Police Chief Brandon del Pozo’s innovation in policing attracted him to the position.
“It is carving out a national reputation for itself on use of force, on response to the opioid epidemic, on community-oriented policing,” he said. “And because of the chief’s ideas and the mayor’s support, it is taking that national reputation and leveraging it in a way that belies its small size.”
At the BPD, Murad is aiming to help officers adjust to some of these changes and listen to officers to address any concerns.
“My immediate role and my immediate goals here are to support the officers as they do these things and to make some of these changes organic to them in ways that resonate with them,” he said.
Murad added that he is also planning on helping the department work on some of its weaknesses. He said like many departments across the country, recruitment of qualified officers poses a challenge, which he will aim to address by communicating to prospective cops the fulfillment the job can bring.
The department is looking to hire more officers right now, Murad said.
Secondly, he said that the profession as whole needs to moderate from the over-enforcement that permeated the 2000s decade and find alternative methods of addressing quality-of-life crimes.
Del Pozo, who also worked for the NYPD before coming to Burlington, said that Murad’s passion for policing is clear in his decision to take a pay cut to join the department.
“They say policing is a calling, and it’s not necessarily about the money or the benefits,” he said. “And I think Jon Murad’s desire to come home and wear the uniform in our city truly shows how much of a calling it can be.”
