Burlington Police Chief Jon Murad’s actions during a hospital altercation last year “did not rise to professional misconduct,” the Vermont Criminal Justice Council said in a letter to Murad dated Oct. 10. But the council also chastised him over the incident and called on him and the city to make a plan to prevent such incidents from happening again.
Murad shared the letter from criminal justice council executive director Heather Simons on Wednesday evening with members of the media. Findings from the council are not normally public.
“Transparency is vital to doing better and my goal is to do better,” Murad said in an email disclosing the letter.
In her communication, Simon said that the council’s professional regulation subcommittee had met in early September to review the hospital incident, which took place in August 2022 and involved Murad and a University of Vermont Medical Center doctor.
Burlington police were in the hospital’s emergency department to question a victim following a shooting on Shelburne Road when a verbal argument took place between Murad and a doctor. Murad reportedly threatened to arrest the doctor, who later filed a complaint with the Burlington Police Commission. That panel then forwarded the complaint to the state’s criminal justice council, which sets standards for the training of law enforcement and investigates police misconduct.
News of the complaint wasn’t publicly known until April 2023, when Seven Days broke the news of the complaint against Murad.
When the criminal justice council reviewed the incident, it was “surprised, and frankly, taken aback that someone of your experience allowed the encounter, while brief in duration, to elevate to a shouting match in which it appears that you lost control of your behavior,” Simons wrote in the letter to Murad.
Simons went on to say the subcommittee that reviewed the incident could appreciate the “stressful” nature of the evening. “However, the overwhelming sentiment from the Subcommittee was that this type of high stress event is precisely when an agency head needs to be his/her calmest, most collected self.”
The subcommittee recommended that Murad and the city develop a plan to “address your personal response to a highly-charged atmosphere and (strategies) to deescalate encounters.”
Despite the criticism, Simons said that Murad’s actions didn’t qualify as misconduct, citing criteria in state law.
In an email to the police department on Wednesday — also sharing the letter — Murad wrote that the council’s admonishment of him “makes sense, because as I’ve acknowledged, I didn’t perform my best that night.”
In an earlier email to the police department in April, Murad said he went to the hospital after hearing that an emergency department doctor objected to the presence of a police officer in the shooting victim’s room during treatment.
“But in trying to help, I didn’t — a hospital employee and I exchanged some words, and I was in the wrong,” Murad wrote.
Simons wrote in the letter to Murad that the review of the incident was closed but that the subcommittee “reserves the right to reopen its review should additional information become available.”
