The Burlington Police Commission voted Tuesday 5-1 to recommend raising the cap on the number of officers on the Burlington Police force from 74 to 82, a sign that the city may be reversing course on police reforms that organizers pushed through last summer, in a fight for racial justice.
The new head count is only a proposal, and requires the approval of the City Council. It’s also not intended as a permanent head count for the department, commissioners said. Burlington is hiring a consultant to provide a new plan for the city’s public safety model, which will help set the final count.
Last June, the Vermont Racial Justice Alliance, alongside a broad coalition of community activists, urged the city to lower BPD’s staffing by 30% via attrition, from 105 to 74. It was part of a broader charge to reimagine public safety in Burlington.
Yet the city is far behind on that plan, which hoped to divert BPD’s call volume away from the police. After more than six months, Burlington has yet to hire a consultant to start the audit process.
Currently, a joint committee of city councilors and the police commission are reviewing RFP responses for the assessment. Mayor Miro Weinberger hired Kyle Dodson in September, in part, to oversee this effort.
In the meantime, BPD’s attrition has progressed “faster, perhaps, than many people presumed,” Police Chief Jon Murad said at the meeting. Some have retired. Others left in the wake of misconduct scandals. And five officers of the officers who resigned this fall cited the summer’s protests and the cuts by the City Council.
At present, the number of sworn officers on BPD’s rolls is 83, though accounting for military deployments and injuries, the effective number is 79. Under the current policy, BPD will not be able to hire new officers until the actual number dips below 74.
At Tuesday’s meeting, Murad stressed to commissioners that the police department would likely see officer levels fall below 74 this year, should the cap remain unchanged. This is because the hiring process for officers is lengthy: It typically takes over a year for any new recruit to join the force, because they have to first go through training at the Vermont Police Academy, which graduates a new class only twice a year.
Allowing BPD to start that hiring process was the primary reason the commission voted to change the cap. New officers would likely not arrive at the department until 2022.
In the meantime, the police department is planning for its officer count to dip below 70 by the fall, as more of its officers become eligible for retirement. Once the total head count is in the mid-70s or below, Murad says, the department will drop its early morning patrols, which cover the shift that sees the lowest call volume, between 3 and 7 a.m. “We will not be able to have the kinds of coverage that we currently have,” Murad said.
BPD does still have several different plans to provide more limited early-morning coverage if that does occur, but Murad emphasized that running shifts with fewer than six officers would be “dangerous” for the police.
Commissioner and UVM professor Stephanie Seguino ultimately supported the decision to raise the cap, leaving commissioner Melo Grant as the lone vote against. But she raised questions about the department’s claims about coverage to the commission, noting that total call volume had decreased about 40% over the last decade.
The police department says its “type three” calls — its most serious designation — have remained steady in recent years. Yet Seguino pointed out that this trend is mostly due to the 52% increase in mental health related incidents, while calls for incidents like assault and burglary have dropped.
“The greatest fear that people have around this is that there will be some violent act that police won’t be there for,” she said. But she said she found that somewhat unlikely, given the call volume data.
“It seems to me that we can’t just evaluate the supply, but we also have to evaluate the demand,” she said.
Commissioner Randall Harp, who voted in favor of the proposal, said that at a certain point, call volume was irrelevant. “It might very well be that there is a minimum level of officers needed in order to provide the baseline level of service that’s provided,” he said. He worried that would be the case if the situation progressed without intervention.
The police department has also floated other ways to meet that demand. At the meeting, Murad also proposed hiring staff to the department who are not sworn police officers, including so-called “community service officers” and community liaisons. They would handle the more low-level calls that come into the department, lessening police contact in those situations.
The commission voted unanimously to recommend the City Council begin hiring more non-officer staff. They plan to send a memo to the City Council outlining their recommendations.
Clarification: This story has been updated to include a more-detailed description of the process for the city’s hiring of a public safety consultant.
