The number of times guns were recklessly fired in Burlington this year is on a steep rise, data show, spurring calls for elected officials to take action.
While there’s broad agreement that the increase in gunfire incidents, as authorities call them, is concerning, voices around the city have different ideas about how to deal with it.
At a press conference Thursday, Democratic Mayor Miro Weinberger spelled out how his administration would respond to the incidents, though his plan offered little in the way of new ideas.
Standing alongside acting Police Chief Jon Murad and Chittenden County State’s Attorney Sarah George, the mayor announced that he intends to pursue gun crimes more stringently, recruit more fully sworn police officers and push for more state laws restricting gun access.
But state and federal prosecutors said they’re already doing the best they can to hold shooters accountable, and the mayor’s push to bolster the police department’s ranks has been going on for months. Additional statewide gun control measures, meanwhile, wouldn’t be taken up until the Legislature reconvened next winter. The mayor didn’t specify what measures he plans to push for.
“If you recklessly discharge a firearm in Burlington, you are going to be arrested, and you are going to be held accountable,” Weinberger said.
Not everyone sees that as the solution. To the leader of one of the region’s most prominent social service agencies, the increase in gun violence is tied to societal well-being — something that more criminal prosecution won’t improve.
“There are things that feed into this and one is that, we’re over two years into this pandemic and people are certainly feeling some stress,” said Paul Dragon, executive director of the Champlain Valley Office of Economic Opportunity, in an interview on Tuesday. “… I don’t think, as a society, we have things in place that help people to feel very supported and to help keep the community together.”
For Burlington, the spring of 2020 marked a significant upswing in the frequency of gunfire incidents, and the trend has only grown.
As of Thursday evening, police data show there have been 12 gunfire incidents in Burlington this year — matching the number reported for all of 2020, and just two fewer than the 14 for all of 2021.
There were only 17 total reports of gunfire from 2012 to 2019.
Police distinguish between gunfire incidents and shootings — the latter signifies someone has been struck. Burlington has recorded four shootings this year — as many as the city had in each of the past two years, which were the highest totals recorded since the city switched to its new data collection system in 2012.
“I think it's, at this point, without debate that there's more (gunfire) incidents going on in the state and in Chittenden County than we've seen historically,” said Nikolas Kerest, the U.S. attorney for Vermont, in an interview with VTDigger.
What’s fueling the rise?
Kerest said the increase in gun violence appears connected to what he sees as a similar increase in drug trafficking. Drug traffickers rely on guns for protection and intimidation, he said, and the state’s relatively lax gun laws mean that weapons are sometimes used to barter for drugs.
“In comparison to some other jurisdictions, it's easier to obtain a gun here in Vermont,” Kerest told VTDigger. “In our work, we definitely do see a flow of guns out of Vermont in exchange for drugs that are coming into Vermont.”
Weinberger and George suggested that Vermont’s gun laws, and the record number of firearms purchased in the first two years of the pandemic, have fueled Burlington’s gunfire increase.
“We have to confront this problem through meaningful gun laws,” George said.
In Burlington, police say some of the gunfire incidents this year are related to groups of mostly young people that can resemble informal gangs. But those groups aren’t part of nationally known gangs, such as the Bloods or the Crips, and don’t exist for the purpose of trafficking drugs.
“These are … people who live here, who have been Burlingtonians for many years,” Murad told reporters. “Although narcotics is often involved in some of their criminal histories or their police encounters, it's not the structure under which they operate.”
Kerest echoed the distinction between formal gangs and the unofficial groups described by Burlington police, but declined to say whether his office was investigating gang-related activity in the state.
“I can't really comment on whether there are specific gang involvements that we're seeing. But suffice it to say that we definitely look at those kinds of connections,” he said.
What’s the solution?
Dragon, the social services leader, said charging more people with crimes is not the best solution.
“If we have essential goods that people can afford, places for them to live, mental health and substance use programs, and strong communities, I don't think we're going to see the violence that we see, and there won't be the need for incarceration, which is a very expensive prospect,” he said.
But state and federal prosecutors have moved in the opposite direction. In response to the increase in gunfire incidents, Kerest said his team is devoting “significant resources” to gun or drug crimes that local police departments bring to their attention.
“My strong message to the chiefs is that we are here to listen and consider investigating and taking cases involving violence,” Kerest said.
At the press conference, George — who is facing Williston lawyer Ted Kenney in her bid for reelection this year — expressed a similar message regarding state-level charges.
“If somebody does commit a serious, violent crime in which we have the evidence that we need, they will be held accountable,” George said.
But her office has struggled to prosecute people because of forces outside its control, George asserted. The shutdown of courts during the pandemic created a backlog of cases, and judges are dropping some charges brought by prosecutors to make up for that.
In addition, George said, police departments are not always able to provide evidence that can lead to charges in a gunfire case. Of the 38 incidents since 2020, Murad said, arrests have been made in 18.
The police chief argued that his department could address gun violence more aggressively if it had more officers on staff — something that Weinberger said he intends to allocate funds for in the city’s fiscal year 2023 budget.
That budget, which the City Council is set to vote on at the end of this month, would include money for officer recruitment and retention, with the goal of rebuilding the department to its authorized cap of 87 officers on the force, Murad said.
For now, though, Murad has made concessions to keep some members of the thinned-out department on patrol around the clock. That includes the “midnight shift,” from 10:15 p.m. to 8:15 a.m., when most of the recent gunfire incidents have taken place.
The midnight shift has the sparsest staffing — two officers — because it has the lowest number of calls for service, Murad said. But those calls for service can be some of the most serious, such as a shooting at City Hall Park last month where three officers handled a crime scene that stretched across a city block.
“We can’t staff based on these kinds of incidents that are so rare,” Murad said at a Police Commission meeting last month. “We are making do with what we’ve got.”
As part of the department’s plan to make do with fewer officers on patrol than in past years, Murad assigned “community service officers” to patrol the city’s downtown. Those officers can carry out administrative tasks and write tickets, but do not have the power to arrest anyone or use force.
Progressive City Councilor Gene Bergman pointed to the community service officer role and other new programs at the police department as strategies to reduce gun violence.
“There needs to be an active public safety presence. That public safety presence doesn’t have to be uniformed,” the Ward 2 councilor said at a meeting on Monday.
But when the gunfire starts, officers without the ability to use force won’t be sufficient to keep people safe, argued Councilor Joan Shannon, D-South District.
“It is problematic and a disservice to victims when individuals … aren’t held accountable for their actions,” Shannon said at the meeting Monday. “We need police to solve these crimes.”
