Vermont State Police warn that severe staffing shortages are curtailing their ability to assist local police departments — restricting troopers’ responses in three communities to “violent crime, in progress crimes, or other calls that are clearly emergencies.”
Police departments in Shelburne, Springfield and Hardwick have received the notices this year after asking for help because of staffing shortages of their own, said Col. Matthew Birmingham, director of the state police.
In his memo to Shelburne on March 4, Birmingham said state police could only provide assistance after the town undertook a six-point action plan that included reorganizing police department personnel and creating an on-call system. And even then, assistance would be limited to the most serious situations.
“Our desire to help is stymied by the fact that we are experiencing the same challenges,” Birmingham wrote. “We are currently operating at our lowest staffing levels in decades.”
Last year, he said, state police lost three officers for every one it hired. Its applicant pool also shrank from the annual target of 700 to around 300.
Under these circumstances, Birmingham said, local police should first exhaust other alternatives before asking state police to cover calls for service.
The reorganization outlined in his action plan included moving all sworn personnel to patrol functions and eliminating detective divisions, specialized units and specialized assignments.
He also advised the Shelburne Police Department to maximize its officers’ overtime hours, and to hire officers from surrounding agencies to cover shifts at an overtime pay rate “to make the work more compelling.”
In an interview, Birmingham acknowledged that eliminating specialized units, such as detective divisions, could slow down investigations but said responding to emergency situations is the most important job for police.
“The reason we asked for that is that the state police can’t come in and help you if you’re not willing to strip your staffing down to its core emergency function,” Birmingham said. “We just don’t have the capability to absorb workloads from these police departments.”
His memo stressed that state police are always available to assist with any incident that requires specialists, such as the Major Crime Unit and Technology Investigation Unit.
Birmingham said the Hardwick and Springfield police departments received a similar memo back in February, when they reached out to Vermont State Police for assistance.
Shelburne and Springfield police are now being augmented by state police — for no charge — after showing that they still needed help even after implementing Birmingham’s action plan. Shelburne police said state troopers cover them from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. every day.
“We’ve never had to do this before,” Birmingham told VTDigger, “especially for police departments as big as Springfield and Shelburne.”
The Shelburne Police Department has funding for 12 officers but only has seven on staff right now — not enough to patrol the town around the clock and respond to calls for service.
Before state police provided reinforcements starting March 21, the Shelburne department reached out for help from the Chittenden County Sheriff’s Department and from the Hinesburg, Williston and South Burlington police departments, offering overtime pay for willing officers.
But all those police forces were similarly understaffed and overworked, according to Mike Thomas, Shelburne’s acting police chief.
“Those departments are working on overtime right now themselves, so their officers weren’t going to want to take on additional overtime in another town,” he said.
State police responses to calls for service in Shelburne and Springfield follow a certain process, as specified in the memo. Troopers will respond to emergency incidents, such as violent crimes and crimes in progress, once they are screened by the local police department.
Birmingham emphasized that low staffing levels don’t affect its service to towns with no police departments of their own. About 200 of Vermont’s 246 municipalities rely on state police for law enforcement.
So far, Birmingham said, all of the state police’s patrol shifts are being covered, though more troopers are working overtime to meet the demand. Vermont State Police is authorized to have 332 troopers, but right now has only around 290.
“It puts pressure on the troopers who have to work more and then it puts pressure on our budget,” Birmingham said.
Law enforcement agencies across the U.S. are struggling to retain and recruit officers. This has become more pronounced in the past couple of years amid factors such as the coronavirus pandemic, worker shortages and calls to defund the police after the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020.
In Vermont, according to a 2021 survey conducted by state police, there’s been a 14% decline in the total number of officers available for duty between 2018 and 2021.
Thomas, head of the Shelburne police, said he didn’t want to ask state police for assistance, knowing of the trooper shortage. But he also didn’t want the quality of policing in his town to suffer, or the physical and mental health of his officers when some were working 70 hours a week.
Still, having no Shelburne police officers patrolling for certain hours of the day apparently took some getting used to.
“That first night when we left here, and we knew there was nobody from Shelburne on patrol, it was kind of an eerie feeling,” Thomas said.
