BURLINGTON — City police have launched a new system for patrolling downtown, officials announced Thursday, in response to concerns about a perceived deterioration in public safety last summer and fall.
Instead of dividing the city in half and assigning three officers to each section, as of May 1, acting Police Chief Jon Murad’s “City Center Plan” dedicates two fully sworn police officers and two of the department’s “community service officers” — staffers who can write tickets but can’t use force or carry a weapon — to downtown and most of the Old North End each shift, the chief said at a press conference Thursday.
An additional two fully sworn “roving officers” will cover the rest of the city, with one assigned to the neighborhoods south of downtown and the other to the New North End, according to Murad.
The City Center Plan is part of a broader “Downtown Public Safety and Activation Plan” rolled out Thursday by Democratic Mayor Miro Weinberger. In addition to the policing changes, Weinberger’s plan includes the hiring of unarmed city staff to act as a “presence” in Burlington’s public spaces, as well as a barrage of city-sponsored events planned for the warmer months.
With a thinned-out police department that is expected to lose more cops by the end of the summer, Weinberger said, the public safety plan aims to instill an environment that is “safe, welcoming and inclusive for all” in the city’s cultural and economic hub.
Last year, some business owners and residents decried what they saw as an alarming uptick in disruptive behavior downtown. Along with a string of high-profile assaults, retail store owners complained of an increase in shoplifting and unruly passersby, while managers at bars and restaurants hired a private security company to escort employees back to their cars late at night.
The situation — wrought in part by a tripling of the homeless population during the pandemic — was made worse by the declining number of officers on patrol, Weinberger said.
“Having a public safety presence is important, and we struggled to provide that sufficiently last summer,” the mayor said. “The plan that we laid out here today is intended to do just that.”
But with a scarcity of new, fully sworn officers entering the ranks — and the mandate of a City Council resolution ordering the department to reinvest police funds in social services — the police department has expanded its existing unarmed positions to fill the gap in public safety services.
In addition to the community service officers, Burlington has hired three “community support liaisons.” The liaisons are in-house social workers for the department who follow up on incidents, especially those involving a mental health issue, after sworn officers have responded to them.
The city has also beefed up its staffing outside of the police department to promote public safety. Seasonal employees who monitor the city’s beaches, called “yellow shirts” by city staff, will make a return this summer, and an “urban park ranger” program that was announced last fall is taking off this summer, said Cindi Wight, the city’s director of parks, recreation and waterfront.
As part of the public safety plan, the city is sponsoring more than 100 events between May and October in City Hall Park this year, said Doreen Kraft, head of Burlington City Arts, the city’s arts and event promotion division. Last year, the city hired a private security company to patrol the park and crack down on unlawful behavior.
“We’re hopeful that these kinds of events bring the right people into the downtown and make it a place where we can actually feel like the community we want to be,” Murad said.
Police reform efforts
Officials cautioned that the plan to reassign officers around the city is just that — a plan, subject to circumstances that interfere with it.
While the largest police presence will be in the downtown area — where more than 50% of calls for service originate, Murad said — officers are dispatched to wherever they’re needed.
If fewer than four officers are available for a given shift, the department will likely revert back to its “North/South Plan,” with a group of officers covering a designated half of the city, or just allot all officers on duty to the city at large, Murad said.
The plan only applies to two of the department’s three daily shifts: the “day” shift, which runs from 7:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., and the “evening” shift, which runs from 4:45 p.m. to 2:45 a.m.
The department’s “midnight” shift — from 10:15 p.m. to 8:15 a.m. — will maintain the staffing level of two officers it already had, according to Murad.
The department has responded to a rash of reported gunfire incidents (incidents where a gun is fired but the bullet doesn’t necessarily hit a person) during the midnight shift over the past month. Still, Murad said the shift still has the lowest number of calls for service.
“But the number of calls for service that are of a higher priority is disproportionate,” Murad told reporters.
Absent from the press conference was any mention of the department’s planned “social-service crisis team,” a squad of mental health workers who would respond to personal emergencies. Launching the program — which is based off of a similar initiative from Eugene, Oregon called “CAHOOTS” — was one of the City Council’s directives in its resolution on police reform.
The city has received and is evaluating bids from two organizations to run the program, Murad told VTDigger after the press conference.
“It’s very unlikely (the crisis response team) would be implemented before the end of the summer or later,” Murad said in a text.
The lack of visible progress on the crisis team didn’t please Councilor Joe Magee, P-Ward 3, who attended Thursday’s press conference.
“It concerns me that that wasn’t part of today’s presentation, and I’ll definitely be looking for more information from the administration on that front,” Magee told VTDigger in a phone interview after the conference.
Murad is slated to present the police department’s fiscal year 2023 budget, which accounts for the period from July 1, 2022 to June 30, 2023, at Monday night’s Board of Finance meeting.
Correction: Acting Police Chief Jon Murad’s first name was misspelled in the photo captions of an earlier version of this story.