RUTLAND — On Feb. 6, surveillance cameras at a local retail store recorded a woman taking a jacket, towels, backpacks and a tote bag out of the building without paying for them. Their total cost was about $167, according to the store management.
Two days later, Rutland city police said, she returned to that T.J. Maxx store and left with unpaid merchandise worth $123.
On March 6, police said, she tried to take $357 worth of dishwashing detergent pods from a local Price Chopper supermarket. And five days later, she went back to T.J. Maxx and took two pairs of sneakers valued at $80, despite an outstanding order not to enter the store.
She faced new charges on March 23, when police said they found her sleeping in an icebox outside a store, in violation of her court-ordered curfew; on March 25, when she allegedly trespassed at Walmart and lied about a companion’s shoplifting; and in mid-June, on a new trespassing charge after she told police she’d taken illicit drugs.
Court documents show that the 31-year-old woman, who remains in the community while awaiting trial, is facing 28 unresolved criminal cases since 2019, including nine this year alone. She has the second-most unresolved criminal cases in Rutland County, according to the local state’s attorney’s office.
The dozens of charges she faces reflect what Rutland city officials describe as a growing problem with repeat offenders — one the city government doesn’t have enough tools to combat. Mayor Mike Doenges said solutions are needed from state leaders in the executive, legislative and judicial branches.
“Action by the state is past due. We need emergency measures NOW,” Doenges said in a Facebook post on Oct. 18, where he announced a community meeting at the Paramount Theatre Thursday evening at 6:30 to discuss the issue.
“It is widely known there is no accountability for offenders beyond a ticket and a future court date; this leaves those who are on the edge of making a poor decision, with even fewer deterrents than ever before. And it leaves our communities vulnerable,” he wrote.
Data from Rutland city police shows that, in the first nine months of this year, 31% of people they arrested or cited had at least two prior charges by the police department — up from 26% during the same period in 2022.
In an interview, Doenges said he called the community meeting to discuss data related to the rise in local crimes and so state leaders could hear directly from city residents about how the situation is affecting them. He is expecting Rutland-area state legislators to attend the meeting, as well as executives from the Vermont Agency of Human Services and the Department of Corrections.
“The state needs to be held accountable,” he said in an interview.
According to a VTDigger analysis of the latest FBI crime data, between 2019 and 2022, larceny — which is the theft of personal property — registered the greatest increase of any type of criminal charge in the city of Rutland.
The Rutland City Police Department reported 711 larceny offenses last year, up from 329 in 2019. A third of the larcenies last year were shoplifting and about a quarter were thefts from motor vehicles. While those numbers rose sharply, the FBI figures show larcenies were actually more numerous about a decade ago.
Police charges for violent crime, while less common than property crime, have also been on the rise in Rutland since 2020, driven by an increase in aggravated assaults. There were 35 such incidents in 2020; the number jumped to 57 last year. In the past two decades, according to the FBI data, police charges for aggravated assault in Rutland peaked at 70 in 2017.
Doenges said he hopes data presented at the community meeting will dispel any misconceptions — such as a sense of pervasiveness of random crimes — that are fueling people’s fears. “One of the things that people are really nervous about is the rise in violent crime,” he said, “but it’s very tightly tied to very specific incidents.”
The mayor also hopes the meeting will spur state leaders to change state policies and laws so that offenders are held accountable. “The police force is reactionary,” he said. “We want to prevent the problems too, and that’s done through accountability.”
Rutland County State’s Attorney Ian Sullivan agreed about the importance of accountability in the criminal justice system, especially for repeat offenders. Key to achieving this, he said, is resolving criminal cases quickly, which shows that an offender’s actions lead to immediate consequences.
“When you get to these dispositions quickly, the effectiveness of responses to ongoing criminal behaviors can be more rapid, can have a greater impact,” Sullivan said in an interview. “Where we’re talking about sometimes years to get to disposition, that, I think, robs everyone of the most meaningful outcomes that the criminal justice system can provide.”
Since the Covid-19 pandemic spread to Vermont in March 2020, leading to the suspension of jury trials for more than a year, the court backlog of cases has intensified. Some courts are hearing cases that date back to 2015, if not earlier.
Sullivan, who has been a Rutland County prosecutor since 2015, said the slowdown in resolving criminal cases has inadvertently made some people think that the criminal justice system doesn’t have teeth.
Now, he said, the challenge is to undo how some offenders regard criminal charges: “This is a piece of paper and there’s no real process backing it up, no real consequences backing it up.”
Erin Petenko contributed to this report.
