BRATTLEBORO — A year after local racial justice activists called for defunding law enforcement to stop the reported targeting of people of color, this politically progressive town has hired the state’s first Black female police chief.
Norma Hardy, most recently assistant police chief of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, will lead the Brattleboro department starting this week, Town Manager Peter Elwell announced Monday.
“She brings to Brattleboro a wealth of law enforcement leadership experience and a demonstrated commitment to work with the community on recalibrating the roles and expectations of the police and our civilian partners,” Elwell said. “She also brings lived experience outside of law enforcement that will help advance the town’s work on diversity, equity and inclusion.”
Hardy, 61, was an Army National Guard member and emergency medical technician before she joined the Port Authority Police Department in 1992. She served as a sergeant, lieutenant, captain, inspector and assistant chief — all while raising her nieces after her brother died.
Beginning police work just before the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, Hardy earned a medal of valor for helping to evacuate a group of truant teenagers. She was supposed to be off the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, when she aided rescue and recovery efforts after a second attack destroyed the twin towers.
Hardy, who writes poetry in her free time, went on to pen:
I’ve met stronger men I’m sure
I just don’t remember when
With barreled chests and big strong arms
To carry our brothers in
I wish my shoulders now
were even more widely spread
so I could hold the grief we bear
and not waver from the dread …
“I thought it was something I was doing for myself until one of the officers I was with read it and started crying,” Hardy said in an interview with the New York Daily News. “He told me, ‘You have to share this.’”
The poem has since been read at many memorials.
“Hardy never liked to lead from on high, and was often seen right next to her cops, no matter the situation,” the Daily News reported upon her retirement from the Port Authority three years ago. “She only had one mandate for her officers: They had to be able to look at themselves in the mirror every morning.”
Police “should always have integrity and always have empathy,” Hardy added. “If you can do that every time you put on the uniform, that’s half the battle.”
Hardy will face challenges as she moves from the Big Apple to Brattleboro. Just before last year’s arrival of Covid-19, town police faced residents seeking a crackdown on a 411% spike in drug-related vehicle break-ins in a community with an often record number of opioid overdoses.
Then. after the Minneapolis police killed Black Minnesotan George Floyd, Brattleboro activists called for a municipally sponsored Community Safety Review Committee that found law enforcement rated among “the worst” in the state for disproportionately stopping and searching people of color.
Police in Vermont’s seventh-largest community pull over Black drivers up to 60% more relative to their small share of the population, for example, even though they’re likelier to find contraband on white drivers.
The committee’s 224-page report called for “acknowledgement” and “accountability” rather than large-scale defunding of what was already an understaffed department.
But local police, budgeted for 27 positions, have seen their numbers drop further to 16 — less than two-thirds the full complement — because of attrition and a lack of qualified applicants.
As a result, officers have reduced daily patrols from three shifts to two, working mostly in person but sometimes while on call at home.
Hardy will be one of two Black police chiefs in the state, joining Montpelier’s Brian Peete, and one of three women in the Vermont Association of Chiefs of Police, joining Royalton’s Loretta Stalnaker and Windsor’s Jennifer Frank.
