 Good evening. I'd like to thank all of you for taking the time out of your, what I'm sure your busy lives to be here this evening with us. And this is one of, this is the first of two community forums on public safety. My name is Karen Paul and I'm president of the Burlington City Council as well as being chair of the Public Safety Committee. I want to acknowledge first and foremost, or first I would like to acknowledge and honor the work of the Public Safety Committee. I serve with two other city counselors, counselors Milo Grant and Tim Dority. Their commitment and their dedication to addressing public safety has been significant in the work that we're bringing to you this evening. And their unique perspectives have improved, have greatly improved our collective work. So I just want to acknowledge both of them for the commitment and the time that they have devoted to public, to public safety. After our most basic of human needs, there is no greater impulse than the need for security and safety. We all want to keep one another safe. We all want to live in a community that values both compassion and support with accountability to ensure that there is order. In the past few years, as we all know, we have been challenged by the societal impacts and the emotional loss of a global pandemic. We're dealing, we're still dealing with emotional, with economic upheaval. And there is an uneven and inequitable recovery, not only in our community, but in this country. We're witnessing the struggles of those that are teetering on the edge of not having a home, to those that are living completely unsheltered. And we know that there is an unparalleled and increasing need for mental health supports. With the infiltration of synthetic drugs in our community on the heels of the opioid epidemic, this is ushering in the third wave of drug challenges. And with it, we're seeing needles on our streets. We're seeing them in our playgrounds. We're seeing them in our parks. We know that there is intense amounts of drug trafficking, and there are dramatic, dramatic increases in crime, all sorts of crime in our community. The wave that we're experiencing of public safety challenges runs counter to our core values of being a welcoming and inclusive community. And there's no question that this, that these past couple of years have really tested all of us much more than we ever could have imagined. On October 10th of this year, the city council passed a resolution declaring the unprecedented increase in drug use to be our city's top health and safety priority. The council expressed fervent support for this resolution and the meeting was attended by over 400 people. There were about 200 people in the Contois Auditorium, and there were another 200, over 200 that were joining us online. We heard that evening from 50 people, 50 community members who spoke during public forum, and while there was a wave of despair at the challenges that we face, there was also a lot of hope expressed that solutions could be found if we embrace change and we embrace new approaches that maybe may seem novel to us. But that's really the way that lots of new ideas get started. We need to know, we need to do more. We know that we need to do more to address public safety. And the city council knows that our community wants action. We know that we all yearn for a safer and stronger community. So it's our job to take on these challenges and to provide opportunities for the community to express your views to your elected officials at all levels of government and to work to find solutions so that we can find our way to the community that we all want for one another. That's why we're here tonight. One of the items that was in the October 10th resolution was the creation of these community forums. There's a need for all of us to be informed. We need to educate ourselves. And we also need to correct some of the misinformation that is prevalent in our community when it comes to public safety. We need to all have the same tools to develop a vision for public safety. And that's one of the first goals. That is the first goal of these community forums. Shortly we're going to hear from a panel of experts to get us started. The second part of the community forum is an opportunity to ask questions. That's the majority of this evening and the second public forum. It's an opportunity for us to learn what's on the minds of our neighbors, all community members. And we need to address the concerns. We again need to correct the misinformation that is perhaps not pervasive, but certainly prevalent in our community. And we need to do our best, our very best, not to point fingers, but rather to embrace the good in all of us to move forward. Because that's the only way that we're going to problem solve and come up with solutions. In the second community forum, which will be next Tuesday, just to give you a sneak preview, we will hear from other experts. There will be more questions. You'll have an opportunity to offer suggestions, creative and innovative, innovative approaches, and to listen to one another, to critique ideas, keeping in mind that the time for boldness is upon us. We can't wait any longer. So if you have an idea that you think isn't a good idea, please don't be compelled to first think it's about a not a good idea. Please come forward with the idea. The reason that we know, and there are a number of city counselors that are here as well with me, the reason that we know that you're here is because you care. Because you want things to be better. And we also know that you're ready to contribute and that you're ready to impact your community. So let's do that. We do have a moderator for the evening, the director of business and workforce development. Our car on this worry is here. I'll let you take it from here. Thank you. And thanks again for being here. Great. Thank you, President Paul. Welcome and good evening to everyone. As President Paul said, I'm Cara on the Srowie. I'm the director of business and workforce development, which also includes the church street marketplace. And I am happy to welcome all of you here this evening. Unfortunately, our mayor could not be here. He wanted to be, but he has come down with COVID yesterday. And so I am sure he is watching from home. In addition, we if you had followed the emails, we did have some other panelists lined up for this evening as well. US Attorney Carrist and Special Agent Schmidt both came down with illnesses today as well. Might be a time for us all to start wearing our masks again, I guess. So given that there's a lot of eagerness about these subjects, we've decided to move ahead with this presentation anyway. And knowing that this was important to the public, we have representatives here from our Burlington Police Department and Senate President Pro Tem Phil Baruth is here as well. And they're both here to talk about the work being done on the city team level as well as the statewide level to address the issues of drug trafficking and gun violence. So before we kick off, I just want to briefly run through the agenda, which is going to be we're going to hear from our panelists about the work that they're doing and leading to address these issues. I will then read some questions that were submitted online. So for those who could not be here, we did have an option that you could submit questions online and I have some of those. And then the latter part of the evening will be taking questions from all of you for our panelists. So let me tee up our police department presentation. As the mayor has said many times, the city prioritizes both effective enforcement and lifesaving harm reduction measures. Without both, we're not going to be able to move forward. So while the BPD has long been a national leader in adopting harm reduction strategies, we have Chief Murad here and Lieutenant Mike Beliveau here to talk about the law enforcement and drug interdiction actions the city is taking. And we will dive into the harm reduction and treatment side of this issue at our next forum, which President Paul had mentioned, and which will be occurring on the 19th. Addressing the drug crisis has obviously been a top priority of the mayors and the administration as well as the councils since 2015. The Burlington Police Department, including our detective unit have been critical leaders in all of that work. I'm pleased now to hand it over to the Chief Lieutenant Beliveau and take it away. Thank you so much, Kara. And thank you all for being here. This is a really well attended event. There's a crowded room and it's really terrific to see this many people here for this topic. I'm sorry that you're not getting the full panel because I think there's a lot to be said in many ways that go beyond what BPD is doing. But I will start with with sort of some baseline from BPD. It's a presentation. I'll move through it relatively quickly because it will be available to all of you online. But it really is about setting a baseline so that we can get into the deeper questions that each of you has. First slide, please. So this is a picture of our staffing in the department, and it shows both the where we went and also where we're going. And that part I think is the most important bit that we are attempting to restaff and regrow. But what this translates to, and I'll show it on the next slide is a picture of a department that used to field as many as 52 non-supervisory sworn police officers on patrol and about 10 to 12 non-supervisory detectives in Detective Bureau, and it can no longer do that. Next slide, please. This is how we currently are staffed. This is where those 69 people that you saw are assigned. Some of them are unavailable. And that includes new recruits that just graduated from the police academy. That includes officers who are, we have one officer who's out with twins, and that's wonderful. But it means not effective. And so those folks aren't available. This is what we do with those who are available. You'll see the blue is unavailable. Green is patrol. Supervisors are dictated not by the number of officers you have, but by the number of shifts that you have. And we don't have fewer hours in the day. We don't have fewer shifts. The shifts are smaller with regard to non-supervisory officers. But the number of supervisors is dictated by, you need a sergeant on every shift. And so we also have an airport. We are responsible for the Burlington International Airport and policing that. And then, of course, we have what Lieutenant Detective Commander Mike Bellovo does, which is the work in detectives. Next slide, please. Here are those academy graduates. This happened just a couple of Fridays ago on December 1st, and went down, got to see them graduate. They were hired back in August. They made it through the police academy. They are not, however, solo effective officers yet. They've got to go through another 580 hours of field training. And we want that. We want them to be able to go through that. But I'm really proud of this bunch. The young woman that you see there striding forward won both the academic award for the academy and the use of force pistol award for the academy. I think this is a great bunch of young officers. And we are very eager to have them become solo officers on patrol because next slide, please. Our incident volume is higher than it's been in years. In fact, after a lull that was largely created by the pandemic. And remember, there was a time where there were tumble weeds on North Avenue and nobody was out. Nobody was doing anything or driving. And that included much lower calls for service. We are back. And in fact, we are higher than we were in 2018. Now, if I were to push this a little farther back into 2017, 2016, we'd see that those years were slightly higher than we're seeing so far this year. But they were also marked by much, much more interact, excuse me, officer activity with regard to traffic stops. We really don't do very many traffic stops anymore. We used to do thousands of them. And so the diminishment of those also accounts for, if we were to do the same number, and I'm not saying we should, this year's total would be over 30,000 at this point already. Next slide, please. And among that increase in incidents is this, this awful, awful, just abysmal and terrible, unconscionable rise in overdose. These are not fatal overdoses. Fatal overdoses are generally carried by our Valkor system. That's the computer system that we take in calls on and how we categorize calls for service or calls from the public. Valkor, we use untimely death for an overdose because although we may find paraphernalia or the indicia of drug use at the scene, we cannot call it a fatal overdose until the medical examiner is able to determine that. And certainly we have our suspicions. We'll immediately start investigating if we believe that there's a drug nexus. But we don't call it that. So this is overdose. These are incidents to which officers are asked to respond by the public because somebody appears to be overdosing in the public sphere or in a home and friends who are with that person are frightened and call for help. The fire department often responds to these at the same time as we do. Their numbers in ours are almost entirely overlapped. But there are some that they go to that we don't and vice versa. We also attempt to send our community support liaisons. That's a new position that we've created in house social workers. We attempt to have them address overdose after the initial response occurs. So we want either police or firefighters to make that initial response to administer Narcan if it's going to be effective. Unfortunately, many of the synthetic drugs with which we are dealing now are not all that receptive to Narcan. But we want those people to respond for the life safety aspect. And then we want our in-house social workers the CSLs to try to make connections for those who afterwards might be interested in accessing assistance or help. Many times they don't. Many times people are upset that they have had Narcan administered and that the high that they were having has been interrupted. They don't want to give us information. They won't give us names and we're not allowed to compel that information out of them. And so that is a complicating factor as well. Next, please. This is for this audience and for you to share with everyone making drug tips. We want to know about drug activity or suspected drug activity in our public. We want to certainly know about overdoses. That's a life safety issue. But we also want to know whether or not people feel that there's an undue amount of traffic at a house. A lot of people going in and out at all times of day or odd times of day. Do you see the same cars parking in the same corners on the same dead end streets for long periods of time? We want to know that. And our tip line is right on the front page of the Burlington Police Department web page on the city of Burlington website. And though every single one of those tips gets looked at by next slide please. By me, it goes to me. It goes to the members of the drug unit. And they are folks, a sergeant and two detectives and a task force officer who was port to Lieutenant Belevo. Every single one gets looked at. You'll see here that there was a tremendous increase in them in 2022. It is not as bad as it was thus far this year. Again, 2023, as everyone here knows, is not over yet. So this doesn't go to the very end of the year. This goes to only, I think, I ran it through the eighth of the tenth. Golly, I should have brought my reading glasses. So it goes to the eighth of the tenth. But it will not catch up with last year. It's not in the 20 days that remain to us. But it is still higher than in previous years. Next please. And this is what deals with those calls for service. And for the gun crime that we're going to talk about as well. This is our detective bureau. Now patrol is the first entity to respond to anything. Because it is patrol officers who are out on patrol who show up when there is a gunfire incident or a shooting. They're the first ones on the scene. They're the ones who respond to an overdose. But the people who are going to do the work of investigating those shootings, of trying to determine who did it unless a person is apprehended right there on the scene. The people who are going to look into drug tips and determine whether or not there is an enterprise that's going on that we can actually get into and attempt to disrupt, that is going to be the detective bureau. And I'm not trying to take all the wind. Mike is definitely going to have a chance to explain that because he can do so far better than I. But the staffing, I think, levels are important. In 2019 we had a larger drug unit. And we also had something called a street crime unit, which is up at the top. And I probably should have written street crime in white now that I'm looking at this in this light. It was, as opposed to black against that darker blue. Street crime is usually a sergeant and two to three police officers who deal with open air drug sales. They do deal with pattern crimes like porch theft, so called porch piracy. They deal with the things that don't quite rise to the level of being a detective bureau case for general detectives, but also are a little bit more involved than a patrol officer has time to address because patrol officers are always at the beck and call of that radio and those calls for service that come to them and say, hey, we've got a, you know, another incident. You've got to go to this. You've got to go to that. We don't currently have the staffing to have a street crime team. And our drug unit is smaller than it has been in the past. Next, please. So we can't review every single tip. And we'd like to. But our tips are the tips come in and they are often about addresses or locations. And I know that people are frustrated when they make tips and don't feel that enough is being done. I'm hopeful that most of the time they get some kind of reaction from the detective unit, from the drug unit. There will be an email outreach or a call to say, hey, we have this, but we do not have the ability to open a new case for every single tip. And we also have to look at what that tip has given us with regard to specificity of information with regard to pattern with regard to volume of complaints about the location. And with regard to whether or not we feel that we can actually investigate that location. And Mike will be able to actually just sort of toss it to you to discuss that a little bit and what that means. Yeah, so what you saw the tip numbers and they're down. And what I want to stress to you all is that I don't want you all to feel that you're not going to make a tip because we haven't responded to you or nothing's being done. That is a failure to us. If you are not giving us a tip when you see some kind of activity, that's a failure. So that would I would apologize to you for. But what we do look for is patterns of behavior to include short duration stops at known drug locations, hand to hand exchanges, suspicious cars, out of state plates, rental cars, things of that nature. That's very helpful for our drug investigators to know. What's less helpful when we're trying to go after drug networks is users. If you see someone using drugs and you report that to the drug tip line, that might not be reviewed in real time. And there's not going to be much done, you know, a day or two later, unfortunately. But that's my bid on the drug tips. Thanks. Our drug interdiction work is about trafficking. It is not about use. We as a community and as a police department have long understood that substance use disorder is just that. It is a disease. Those who suffer from it are suffering from a disease. And that is not the most fruitful avenue for us to be able to disrupt trafficking or large scale distribution. Now there are, I think, issues that we can discuss tonight about whether or not we are going how we are or are not currently disrupting public use. How we are or are not disrupting the disorder that we see that attends substance use disorder in our public sphere. But with regard to how this unit, the drug, the detective unit, the drug unit operates, we are not looking to, you know, having a call about a user and somebody using is not something that a drug detective is going to respond to. And at the moment it is also not something that a patrol officer is going to respond to. We consider that to be a priority three in the priority response plan that we had to create as head count dropped and call volume began to tick up again in 2021 and 2022. And we are, that is not something that we automatically respond to. If officers encounter it, however, they are supposed to address it, particularly if it's happening in the public sphere, as in, for example, City Hall Park. Another piece with regard to the tips that come in is certainly information is always great and license plates that you see with regularity, descriptions of folks that you see with regularity, those are helpful. We are not ever going to use the materials that someone sends us. Sometimes people who make these tips have put together a lot of time and a lot of effort with video, with photographs, with things that look like what one might see in an episode of The Wire or in an episode of a movie where this is how you put together a drug case. We will not use that material. And I know that Councilor Doherty is here today. And he and I had a discussion of this with a community group who were experiencing some problems in their residence, in an apartment building. And it's difficult to understand, but the fact is that prosecutors will not accept that kind of material from the put. They need to see it from the police. The police have to be able to put that material together in a way that they can corroborate its provenance, that they can attest to when it was taken, how it was taken, who was in it, what was done. That is what's going to allow it to be used in an evidentiary way for a trial. And so for those who are spending a lot of time doing that and then submitting it to us, we appreciate the information, but you don't have to put that much work into it because it's not stuff that we're necessarily going to be able to use. Next slide please. And we have been making cases. We've been making a lot of cases. And this would have been a perfect opportunity if the US Attorney were here. Many of those cases do go to our federal partners. These are a handful. And in the document these should be clickable links that lead to press releases or news articles about these specific cases. We have had a good deal of success with that. But I don't think anyone here is going to be surprised to learn that enforcement against the supply is a drop in the bucket compared to the demand that exists within ourselves. And that is where the best avenue for a true remediation of this problem exists. That said, right now in the state of Frank desperation that our community is in, there is merit to addressing these issues with regard to enforcement and even with regard to jail. But it is not how we will ultimately get a handle on this big problem. Next please. So this slide transitions us into the next part of the discussion and baselines us around gunfire. I want to be clear gunfire according to the Burlington police department is the probable cause that a firearm was discharged in the city. Usually that probable cause comes from evidence from that we find ballistics evidence. We find shell casings. We find an impact point. Maybe we have somebody who is struck. Maybe we have multiple witnesses video probable cause that it was discharged and reasonable suspicion which is a slightly lower legal standard that it was discharged in a criminal way. We do not count hunting discharges which occur sometimes in the new north end along the lake or in the intervail. We do not include suicides. We would not include an accidental or negligent discharge that did not have some sort of recklessness to it. So a person who is taking a firearm out of a holster and discharges it into the floor of their home and that gets reported, we would not count that as a gunfire incident. If it were done in a reckless way, the person was mishandling the firearm, was intoxicated at the same time, was waving it around, that is a reckless discharge and we are going to count that as a gunfire incident. If someone is struck that gunfire incident becomes a shooting and God forbid somebody is killed that gunfire incident becomes a homicide or murder. Now here in this color coding we have the white boxes where we know that a gunfire was a gunfire incident occurred, a gun was discharged, but we do not have much more. We have proof that it occurred in some level but we do not know if it was intentionally at another person, was it just up in the air, what was it. The light blue are incidents where we do know that this was discharged at a human being but thankfully did not strike anyone, but we take it just as seriously because the difference between a gunfire incident and a shooting is often a matter of inches. Dark blue with the X through it, you may not be able to see that small X through it, but dark blue is a shooting where a person was struck and the red is somebody was killed. And the way these boxes work is that the incident is determined by the most severe thing that happened during it. So if an incident included somebody being struck and injured and somebody being killed, it's a red box. So there may be more than one person involved in any of these given boxes. And then the top shows the order in which those incidents occurred throughout each year. That is so that the thing closest to the numbers is going to be the first incident of the year and the thing that's farthest away from the numbers is the last incident of the year. And then the other incident, the bottom chart shows just in type so that you can have a sense of how many gunfire homicides were there, how many gunfire just injuries or shootings were there. Next slide, please. And then this slide is a picture of murder in the city of incidents in which people were killed. Not each of these is a gunfire incident, but the majority since over the last four to five years have been. In fact, gunfire did not used to be the only way people were killed in the city. Over the last few years, it has been an anomaly when people are not killed by gunfire. And that is very troubling to us. I am incredibly, incredibly proud of the work that Detective Belivow and his team have done over these years. There is only one of these incidents that is currently unsolved. And it happened just a few weeks ago and we are digging into it vigorously and are not letting that go. The idea of that kind of solve rate is largely unheard of. It's amazing. It's one thing if you only had one or two. For a city that's had as many as we have over the past three years, it is absolutely extraordinary what Mike and his people have done. And I am very, very proud of them for that. And that is, I believe, the last slide for us. Thank you. So I'll say, I think that's our piece. And then we love to hear questions from everybody. Great. Again, we'll take questions a little later. Thank you. Thank you both to the chief and the lieutenant. I know personally you gave this presentation in October. And in my role, I received a lot of feedback from businesses who are reassured to know that drug trafficking and this gun violence still remains a top priority for the police department, even given your staffing challenges. So we deeply appreciate your work. Thank you so much. But as we transition now to our next speaker, in order to have that accountability, we also need to have the right laws in place. Mayor Weinberger and the Burlington community as a whole has championed common sense gun safety laws for many years. Going back to 2014, when we passed three gun safety charter changes, the administration has continued to advocate for the banning of guns in bars and for new reforms to stop gun violence, like making reckless endangerment with a gun a felony. Senate President Pro Tem Phil Baruth is with us today. He's been a great partner with the city and has been a very strong voice for these reforms in Montpelier. And when it comes to drug trafficking, we all know this is a state-wide crisis. It's also a national nationwide crisis. And the city needs full partnership from prosecutors, judiciary, state agencies, and other law enforcement. I'm really happy to hand it over to Senator Baruth now to talk about some of the recent actions on the statewide level and what the legislature has planned for the coming session. Thank you, Cara. Hey, everyone. I'm Phil Baruth, one of the state senators representing Burlington and longtime Ward 4 resident, currently serving as President Pro Tem of the Senate. I just want to begin by saying the Sandy Hook shooting was 11 years ago tonight. And if you remember that, that's when I got involved in this issue. It was beyond horrific. It involved the death of 20 elementary school kids. And when that happened, I put in a ban on assault weapons in my second biennium and produced, unbeknownst to me, an explosion in the statehouse. And it was a kind of remarkable rejection of that piece of legislation. But every year, we gained more people who were dedicated to gun safety as a goal. And come 2015, we were able to pass the first piece of gun safety legislation in modern memory. It was a very weak bill, but we passed it. And that was pretty much why we put it forward to show it could be done. By 2018, if you remember, Phil Scott signed an omnibus bill on the steps of the statehouse, very much in public view and on purpose, a Republican governor. And I just want to update you on what we've passed since 2018, because back in 2010, Vermont had arguably the weakest gun laws in the nation. This is what we've done in the last eight years. Universal background checks, ban on high capacity magazines, ban on bump stocks, which allow you to simulate the action of an automatic weapon, raise in the age of purchase to 21, ban on guns in hospitals, red flag laws that allow extreme risk to produce situations where you can remove guns from those users. We tightened, didn't close, but tightened the Charleston loophole, which makes sure that only people who pass a background check can get the weapon. And we reassured judges and reaffirmed that judges have the authority to remove guns in domestic violence situations. So that was prior to last year. Then last year we had a strengthened majority in the House and the Senate and we passed a bill H-230, which had in a 72 hour waiting period, safe storage on the New Hampshire model so that if your gun is not secured and it's used in a violent crime, there are consequences for you, legal and civil. And then we expanded red flag laws so that if you are a family member and you are worried about someone in your home using a gun on you, you can initiate the red flag process. So last year was a big year. These past years since 2018 have been big years for gun safety. I was just yesterday at the White House at an event that the Biden Harris administration put together to kind of reinvigorate legislation at the state level and they were commemorating the Sandy Hook shooting. And they had out a little chart where all the states stand on 10 different measures of gun safety. Vermont now ranks in the middle. Now, doesn't sound like much, but if you go back to 2010, we were literally the bottom of the list. So I want you to know that. Then the other thing that I wanna make clear is that everybody in the state house, whether we're from Bennington, Brattleboro, Burlington, everybody knows that this spike in violence is occurring and we have been working on it, not just now, but going back a number of years. So last year in the Senate, we passed a bill called S4. S4 became Act 23. It was signed by the governor. It's called an act relating to reducing crimes of violence and it was specifically designed to address problems we were having in Burlington as well as Bennington. Chief Murad sees this sort of footage all the time. In the Judiciary Committee, I saw footage that I couldn't believe of gun battles in Bennington on the main street. We had testimony about people in Bennington being held hostage by folks and forced to buy guns for them. So that's called straw purchase. Horrific things. We've had our own horrific incidents in Burlington in the last few years. So the measures in S4 were designed as much as possible to speak to those specific problems. Among other things, it increases penalties for knowingly permitting dwelling to be used to deal drugs or human traffic. So if a landlord is alerted that drug trafficking is going on at his or her place and they do nothing, they are now held accountable under this law. So that was a big step. As you all know, landlords are a very powerful lobbying force and that was not easy to get through, but we got a version of that through. We mirrored federal law on making it a crime to remove serial numbers from guns. A lot of times people will file off the serial number to make them untraceable. And we also mirrored federal law on straw purchases. Why is it important to mirror federal law? ATF, and I'm not telling these guys anything they don't know, are stretched thin as well. So they often are not gonna have the officers to come into Vermont and prosecute this straw purchase or that individual incident. So making it a state crime allows our troopers and other folks to go after them. So that's important. The other thing is it banned firearms for people who are subject to final relief from abuse orders. So let's say you initiate the red flag process and there's a temporary period where guns are removed from the home and that's great. It removes the threat temporarily. Then a hearing is held due process. Eventually, if the person is found to be a danger to those in the house, then there's a final relief from abuse order that's issued. If that's issued, those folks are banned from having guns that's reported to the database and it becomes part of the national background check system. Also, if you have now under S4, if you have drug charges pending or you have human trafficking charges pending, you cannot buy a gun and that gets reported to the database. The last piece I'll add on that is it also, there was a weird loophole where juveniles who were being processed for violent crime, their records are sealed because they're juveniles. Since they're sealed, they couldn't get reported to the next database. That obviously had to change and so that became a part of S4 as well. So those changes in S4 were key, but I've saved the one that's most pertinent to you all for last and that is we created the Community Violence Prevention Program and we put $5 million into that effort. What it is, is $5 million available to any Vermont municipality that comes forward with innovative ideas about how to end community violence. So that $5 million we meant to prime the pump. The idea is to continue to up that amount as those requests for proposal come back and we see what we need in terms of funding, we will definitely refill that coffer. So I wanted to make sure also to give credit where it's due to a couple of different places. Morrell Weinberger has been an absolute strong ally from the word go on gun legislation. He worked with other mayors in the state and it helps when we're in the state house and we're being opposed on a gun safety bill. It helps to have mayors in Rutland and Burlington step forward. It also helps to have folks like you come to the state house, zoom in to a hearing in the state house or just online share with your representatives and senators your support for those bills. Then the last thing I wanna say is we are planning on January 17th to kick off this year with triple joint hearing and that'll be Senate committees on judiciary, economic development and health and welfare and they will pick up the public safety issue and they'll look for ways to diffuse it through all the committees in the Senate. So that's nine to noon on January 17th. They are looking for witnesses and when we have information about how folks can participate, we will share that out with you. We'll get it out to the city council and the mayor's office and we will put it out on the Senate page and the house page. But that's meant to say nothing that I've said tonight means we're not working every day going forward on this because we will be but I just wanted you to know we didn't start working today same as the BPD hasn't started working on this issue or the city council. We have all been working on it and we will continue to do so every day of the year. Thank you. Thank you, Senator. All right, that wraps up our presentation from our panelists. Now I'm going to read some questions that we received online. We received many questions. Many of them were repetitive. So we have chosen three right now which do represent a lot of the questions that did come in. This is directed to our police chief. Has the Burlington Police Department filled all open positions? If so, when can we expect to see improvements in response to the rise in criminal activities ranging from drugs and prostitution to graffiti and theft in our homes and businesses? If not fully staffed, what are the barriers to full staffing and what activities are happening to fill positions and what is the timeline? Terrific question and thank you. So as everybody saw on that graph, no, we're not fully staffed. Building back and growing back from that cliff that we experienced over two years of attrition is going to take longer than that cliff took. Climbing up a cliff takes much longer than falling down it. So we are going to have to figure out how to do that. We're working hard. You saw the photograph of the new recruits. I don't unfortunately think we are going to have that strong a class for our next class which is in February, but I do have confidence that we're gonna have a very strong class in August. We are going to recruiting fairs. We have a new recruiting coordinator that is a professional position, not a sworn position. That person accompanies, works with and augments the work done by our sworn recruiting officer who is a police officer. Those officers also, those two positions rather don't just recruit police officers. Our dispatch center, which is supposed to have 12 people and it had four last year. And we had to rebuild that room as well. We're currently at nine or 10 and are working to get it back on the feet there. We have those community service officers. Those are CSOs. They are unsworn professionals. They are not armed. They cannot make arrests, but they can issue tickets for quality of life issues. We are authorized for 11. We currently have six and are working to hire those roles. We also have those community support liaisons that I mentioned, those in-house social workers. We call them CSLs. We're authorized to have six. We currently have five and we have one, I believe, in background. So I'm hopeful that we'll be fully staffed in that position relatively soon. But officers, to climb back up, we are currently authorized for 87 and we've got 69. So that, you know, 18 is going to take a lot of time. And frankly, 87 is not enough. And we used to be authorized for 105. And for us to get closer to that number is going to take that much longer. The plan that the mayor and I articulated, and all of this has been done with his support, his guidance, his tremendous enthusiasm about this endeavor, articulates an idea that we can try to get to that by the ends of fiscal year, sometime in fiscal year 26, I believe. And we are going to keep working at that because we really don't have any other choice. What are we doing in the meantime? We are attempting to figure out how best to deal with what we call priority three calls for service. We were putting a lot of them online. That was inadvertent. We weren't ever supposed to put as many as we did for a while into online reporting because online reporting unfortunately turns into something of a black hole. And we know that our neighbors were not getting the response that they wanted for that. So we have taken many of these incidents off of online reporting, but then what happens is that it gets stacked because right now, for example, there are four non-supervisory police officers covering the entirety of this city. And if a call comes in that is of a lower priority, obviously we want to be able to retain them or have to send them to something that might come up that is more important. It has a greater life safety component. So we had cases that were being reported online from as long ago as February and not being seen until the summer and then not being addressed except piecemeal by officers well into the more recent months. And that was unacceptable. So now what we are doing instead is saying that those cannot be made online. They have to be made in person, but we're not gonna be able to respond in person with any kind of immediacy. So the difference is saying, is it gonna languish for months on end in a digital black hole or is it going to languish for a couple days on end until somebody can finally get to it? The hope is that that latter option is better than the former option, but it comes with a consequence as well. The fact is that you cannot ask half the number of people to do as much as they did when the call volume is 100% of what it used to be. Great, thank you. I also wanna mention that you have a recruitment bonus. Oh, thank you, sure. No, we have a recruitment bonus. We are working on some other innovations there. We have the best compensation in the region. This city council and the mayor worked together and worked with the union on a contract that got the best compensation in the region. And we want good police officers, as I showed you, I think that we have six in this new crowd, but it takes time and we don't want anyone who comes. And as much as we want that bonus to entice people, I don't want people who are here just for that bonus. We want people who want to serve this city who understand the importance of this role, the obligation, the responsibility, the incredible burden that you put on when you put on this uniform and this tool belt. And we want them to take that seriously and to understand what it means. Thanks, Chief. My next question will go towards the senator. And our constituent says, in countries such as New Zealand and Norway, leadership reduces the number of guns significantly after mass shootings and gun violence, sorry, and gun violence has gone way down. How can we do this in Burlington? Is a gun buyback program a possibility? Can we increase permitting and training requirements for guns to be carried in Burlington? Can we restrict areas where guns are allowed, such as bars, the marketplace, city parks, et cetera? Can we keep better track of those who have domestic violence records and make sure they don't have access to guns? Can we provide safe storage for folks who are in a mental health crisis? I recognize you did address some of these, but I just wanna give you an opportunity to do that again. Yeah, it's a great question. I would say the difference between us and any other country is that we have the Second Amendment and we happen to have right now a Supreme Court that is and was picked in part because of their views on guns and they are in place to enact a regime around firearms that I find insane to use a blunt term. So they issued a decision last year called the Bruin decision and the Bruin decision puts a historical test in place and says if guns were not regulated in X-Way in the founding era or up to the 19th century, then you can't regulate them in the current moment. So there was a judge in Texas, I believe an appellate judge who found it unconstitutional to prevent someone who had been convicted of domestic violence from going out and buying weapons. And he upheld that man's right to go out and buy weapons because in the founding era, there was no problem with beating your wife. So like I say, it's a species of craziness craziness in my own opinion. And I will, if Clarence Thomas ever calls me up, I will tell him that to his face. But what I will say is this, the Supreme Court is revisiting the Bruin decision this year. My feeling is that they're doing that because it has automatically produced so many strange rulings and they're looking to nuance it. So in the legislature, the plan at the moment is to wait a year, see what that next decision looks like so that we can go forward with a clearer purpose. But let me just talk about safe spaces for a second. So going back to Justice Alito, I believe it was Alito, who came out with a decision where he said it was well within the Second Amendment to have certain safe protected spaces, places like when you go to the courthouse, you have to go through a metal detector and you can't have a weapon there. If you go to our state house, you can't have a weapon there. If you go to a big stadium, you may be asked to go through a metal detector. If the president is in town, they can create a safe space for the president. So they upheld the idea of safe spaces. We tried to work with that a few years ago and I put out a bill that said you couldn't have a gun in childcare centers, which you currently can, because people assume that since you can't have a gun on a school campus like Edmunds or Hunt or Flynn, can't have a gun there, that's against the law, but there is a loophole for childcare centers. So my bill had childcare centers, government buildings and hospitals. And my reasoning was, why would anyone need a gun in a childcare center in a hospital or in a government building where sometimes people get exercised about this or that issue? I found it impossible to get it through the house and the Senate and by the governor with childcare centers and government buildings in it. So it wound up being a bill banning guns in hospitals. But that shows you that we're still in a place in this state where it is pulling teeth every time you have a certain bill and you have to throw overboard things that seem common sense to you and me. So what I will say is going back to the charter on no guns and bars. To me, that fits within the safe space idea. Seems like it should be constitutional. Problem there is that we have something in Vermont called the Sportsman's Bill of Rights. And the Sportsman's Bill of Rights was passed decades ago and it's meant to prevent a patchwork of laws in every municipality so that there's a uniform standard for guns across the state, fair enough. But what it means is that a place like Burlington, a metropolitan area, can't adopt safer rules than you might have in Brandon or a small town. So that's problematic. Two ways to go about it. One is to repeal the Sportsman's Bill of Rights. That's problematic because it's held in a very semi-sacred status by all of the gun rights folks but also lots of allies that they have in the House and the Senate. So I have tried to work with legislation that'll be statewide. And so what I would like to do is try, as we go forward, rather than trying to do it municipality by municipality, I would rather try to get these sorts of things in a statewide fashion. So make it a rule statewide that you can't have a gun in a bar. I don't know if I'll have more luck that way or by trying eventually to repeal the Sportsman's Bill of Rights. But I would rather not repeal the Sportsman's Bill of Rights. I would rather have all gun legislation across the state. So if I can get that, that's what I plan to do. The other charter changes, some of them we have been able to touch on with our red flag laws on domestic violence. But it's fair to say that Burlington communities like Brattleboro are willing to go much further on gun safety than the state as a whole as currently represented in the House and the Senate. That is changing every year as the list of things that we've passed indicates. But that's still what we're dealing with is a legacy of protections for people's Second Amendment rights and also uses of guns and protections for guns that I don't think accord with the Second Amendment. So that's what I'll say about that. Great, thank you. In the interest of time, we have about 30 minutes left. I think we'll move to taking questions from the audience. I'd like to do it in an organized manner. So if people can raise their hands, I'll have three people line up and three people. Is there anyone else? We can have a third. And then three people, just so we're all teed up, can ask their questions and then we'll move to another group of three if we have time. This is for you, Chief. I got three. Are you successfully engaging with individuals at the highest rates of gun violence and crime? Secondly, are you altering the conditions that promote violence? And last, do you have the potential to reduce violence if your plans are adequately implemented and funded? Thanks, those are three terrific questions. And they come from some playbooks that the federal government is talking about. There's a scholar named Thomas App who has worked on these kinds of ideas. And we have worked to identify people who are most likely to be involved in gun violence. We made a lot of very good arrests over the past couple of years of people who had done that gun violence. There are barriers in play with regard to trying to figure out who might be prone to gun violence. We are concerned right now. Law enforcement in the county is concerned. There are some young people who appear to be trending towards that kind of activity. We haven't seen a lot of it out of there, but that's the kind of place where we would want to be able to create that kind of interaction and a certain degree of outreach to try to work with those folks before something terrible does happen. I think the other question I think was, I know funding was the last one. What was the second? Altering the conditions that promote violence? Well, I think that we did with regard to the enforcement that was done. I think that the arrests that were made over the past two years were instrumental in driving down what we saw with regard to gunfire this year until November. So we were doing a lot better in 2023 than we had done in 22 with regard to gun violence. 2022 saw 26 incidents and four gunfire murders, five murders total. It was pretty, it was something that we had never experienced as a city. And Mike's team just did extraordinary work. Extraordinary work to identify people involved in those make arrests, be able to bring them to prosecutorial partners, both federally and the state's attorney's office, and the state's attorney's office to be able to hold those individuals while they are waiting trial and make certain that those individuals who were real drivers of violence are off the street. I believe that changes things because frankly, there are fewer people than you think and we should all be thankful for this who are willing to point a firearm at another person and discharge it unlawfully. That's a good thing. It's a great thing. It's a fact that most people don't have that in them and that's great. There's some people who kind of have it in them but they need someone else around them who is going to drive that activity and sort of make it okay or push it via peer pressure, via propensity for violence. I think we've done a good job of getting at those drivers and that has lessened the likelihood that people who might have been on the cusp of doing violence and in fact, some of them we do believe committed certain kinds of gunfire incidents, not the kinds that result in striking someone or killing someone but are willing to shoot in the air or to shoot up the city. That is dangerous in and of itself but they're not willing to do that with these drivers out of the picture and I think that has made a difference and with regard to funding, obviously for us funding, the city council has given us the funding that we need to regrow. We're working to implement that and use it but I don't have, there's certainly things we would still like. I mean, there's not a department head in the city that wouldn't like a little bit more and all of us have the things that we want more of in the city. Better, you know, more money for the schools, more money for the library. There's certainly things I could ask for but I don't know that there's any specific thing that we could devote money to with regard to this particular problem. Mike, do you? Just in addition to that, we also have begun collaborating with Chittenden County law enforcement surrounding the youth violence and that's taking place at the state's attorney's office and that's a monthly meeting so far. It's a newer program but that's ongoing as well. And that too, again, if ATF, especially Agent Schmidt were here or if, excuse me, if the U.S. Attorney were here, U.S. Attorney Charest, they would also be talking about the degree of collaboration that we have there too. So what Lieutenant Bellovo is describing with regard to this concern we have for rising youth violence or youth crime is also built on an incredibly successful relationship that we created last year with the ATF and with other agencies around the county, the Chittenden County Gun Violence Task Force and that was created with the strong support of the mayor and with the incredible collaboration of the ATF to leverage their ability to take cases federal. They've got investigatory tools that we don't have with regard to forensics and then we have the people on the ground who really know a lot of the players and that team was basically called out for almost every gunfire incident in 2022 and 2023. They are instrumental with the terrible, terrible incidents earlier this month in which three young men from, of Palestinian origin were shot. It was ATF agents working underneath Lieutenant Bellovo who made that apprehension because Mike knew the door to send them to and was making certain that we were covering all of our investigatory steps but that relationship has been tremendously fruitful as well. Great, thank you. Next question. So I wanted to start by saying thank you to everybody who's on the stage right now. I know how hard you are working towards this and I really appreciate the effort you've made. My question is really for President Paul. In your democratic caucuses, you talked about how you were able to get extra money for the city to help us over the winter months with extra security that you hired in from the outside. I'm concerned about what happens, how long that lasts because as we've seen by the Chief's presentation it takes a long time to get officers in, trained and capable and as a mother who has a 24 year old living on Church Street who's a medical care worker who, her shift starts at 4 a.m. She's been stalked, she's been followed, she's been chased, she's been assaulted. What do I do to get past winter and how fast? Because it's not fast enough for me so what can we do to make sure that that money doesn't run out while the Chief has the opportunity to build the staff that he needs? The impetus for the funding that we got was for helping our downtown during the critical holiday season. That was the point of that funding and because of being able to find $50,000 in the city's budget, we were able to get another $50,000 privately and that went actually to Cara's department to find the staff for that which has been an ongoing effort. I can't really speak to what will happen after that because that was the point of the funding was to make it so that our downtown could thrive particularly during a period of time where most merchants will tell you that somewhere between 25 and 35 or 40% of their revenue comes during that critical holiday season. We will be in the process of doing our FY24 budget. Are we in 24? No, we're in 24. Our FY25 budget and I have no doubt that public safety will be front and center when we are figuring out the funding for how we are gonna be budgeting that but that's as many people know the budget for the city of Burlington is still the mayor's recommended budget although I do know that that will be a very high priority. If I could answer you directly as well. Those funds that President Paul helped secure for us we are using a mixture of private security and over time Burlington police officer shifts. Those are when filled running from noon until midnight which I understand does not cover your child's shifts and just so the public knows to fulfill those shifts that runs eight to $10,000 a week. It's an expense that we felt the need to use right now to expend right now whether that's sustainable or not. I'm not sure and as President Paul said we will address it in the budget cycle. It's only one piece of how we're trying to address it but I appreciate the question. Thank you. Thank you, please. Hello everyone. I have been a citizen in Burlington for the last two years. I'm past 70 years old and I've lived in Burlington the last two years but in Williston most of the other time and I've seen such a change in Burlington that I'm just so sad about it. I believe as I look back and I see when they started defunding the police it's all kind of started with more violence and I'm not a fan of Sarah George because I think she has a catch and release policy where assaults are not being dealt with. They're just not and the more violent the criminal becomes you look at his record and it's a mile long because nobody had ever done anything when they first put him, tried to do something with him or her. And I just wanted to know, I really admire our new chief. You're doing a great job. How you feel about how these crimes or simple assaults can be a misdemeanor and they're really, so what do you think? Well, thanks for the question. I was born in Burlington. I too feel that Burlington is different than it has been. I came back to Burlington in 2018 after having been away for a very long time, for college, for a career in the NYPD, for some other things and it was wonderful, wonderful to be home for the first year. 2019 was really awesome. 2019 was great. I too feel it different and I'm sorry for that and I feel partly responsible for that difference and I know that there's aspects of addressing it are my professional responsibility and so I feel it keenly. With regard to the question that you asked, simple assault is a misdemeanor and it's not anything but a misdemeanor anywhere and so we do have lesser offenses and also lesser penalties for those offenses. Vermont as a state operates under a belief that we want to have the least intrusive response to crime as possible. We do not want to intrude on the individual to the best of our ability and therefore we predicate almost everything that we do on a belief in the presumption of innocence which is central to America's idea of jurisprudence but in Vermont we go a little bit further than that I think and we really are reluctant to incarcerate don't believe that that is the state's attorney's role I think that that is a factor in our laws what we have told our legislators what we've told our judges and written into our code. That said I do think that there are opportunities to be a little bit more to be a little bit stricter in our interpretation of the law. Many penalties do provide for a certain amount of jail upon conviction, excuse me many offenses do provide for jail upon conviction and generally the system doesn't really want to do that. I think the system needs a readjustment and I think that we are in a place right now where some of the efforts we have made towards I think trying to find other alternatives are not currently working for us and that means a period of time in which we may need to go in a different direction focus on more intrusive methods that do remove folks who are causing public harm and making our public sphere less conducive to everyone else's use of that public sphere and put them, remove them for as long as we lawfully can. Okay, thank you. Thank you chief. Sandy? Yeah, I'm Sandy Baird and I'm a resident of award one and two things have occurred to me in this debate. I thought actually about public safety which I assume that this is what's about and not only about gun violence. One of the things that has concerned me as an attorney over the past couple of years is the inaccessibility that many of my clients and many of the citizens of Burlington have had to the police department and to the police station. You can call, I called one night over and over on behalf of a client who was arrested I thought inside the police station and could not even get a person to answer the phone. I went down to the police station to try to get in to see if I could get a dispatcher to at least allow me to talk to that client. The police department was actually closed and locked and I wandered around City Hall Park for a long night and then was told finally by a police officer that lawyers were not permitted into the police department. That was unheard for me a couple of years ago. And I think what reminded me of this was going actually to the bagel bakery on Wednesday morning to talk to the mayor. And what I saw there was also citizens who are incredibly concerned about the mounting crime and violence in our city as I am. I am a person who has represented women in domestic violence situations for years. And they, of course, those incidents of crime are also increasing because it's harsh times. But I was amazed at what the citizens were willing to agree to in a way to stop crime. And a lot of that stuff, as the chief just reminded us, what would have been constitutional violations. You cannot keep people in jail forever for making noise in City Hall Park or for uttering obscenities. You cannot sentence people to those kinds of crimes. They're gonna be out in the streets very soon. And if we honor our American constitution, we would not ever to be different. So that was one concern that I have. The kind of mood in our city, to me, is justified. However, we have to remember that this is the United States of America and we have to also obey our constitution, I hope. And I'm certain that the police would want that too. But also, the second concern that I really have is that people tell me over and over they are not able to get through to the police at all on the phone. That, to me, is a real concern in terms of public safety and I would urge you all to do something about that. Thank you so much for that. The 911 does work. You can call 911 at any time and get through 911. We don't have that number. Everybody has 911. 911 is how you get ahold of the police department. The police department's number is 658-2700. Yes, but that is not the number to use to get ahold of the police for police response. Police response should go through 911. And if you call 911, you get a police response. Romeo? Thank you. Chief First, I want to thank you for the work that you do. And thank you everybody for being here as well. So one of the things that I do remember that folks who are pushing for having an oversight body for the police department was due to the lack of trust that some community members were having with the department. And what I want to find out, and I'm sure some of the communities are very interested in is that special minority communities here in the city is what would the department do to repair the relationship as it were, 2024 and moving onward. We, based on your presentation, you guys spoke of the tip line, how people call in and all that stuff. In part, some of the reasons why people are afraid to call in is because they don't want to speak against a family member or somebody else who is within the community. So through the relationship building, what is the department going to do so this way folks are much more willing to speak up if something happens or just have that better, much more interaction between the department and community members, as I said earlier, especially minority communities. Cause I've seen that quite often that happening a lot where community members are much more afraid to speak up for somebody who does work at the transit center. A lot of the time when things happen, I ask folks, why are you unable to call the police department? And their answer mostly is like a vague answer where they're afraid to speak up or they just feel like if you call the police department they see more like a rat as that was mentioned earlier or somebody who more or less sucks up to authority as it were. So in short, what would the police department as it were to build that trust with community members? So this way people feel much more that we're together in one city where we can take care of each other and that the police is able to effectively not only respond but also have that much more community interactions and meetings where not necessarily this forum per se but a forum where that is led by you and your department members and say the African American communities or the Muslim communities or the Jewish communities, that kind of close interaction as it were. So there's a better response, 2024 and onward. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, I mean, I think that some of that is being done by our CSLs. Some of that is we have a new public information officer or PIO who's also a community engagement coordinator. Other parts of it are our transparency efforts as far as making certain that we give as much data as we can. Those are efforts in order to build trust but the relationship building that you're talking about is a much more retail process and a lot of that is done at the level of the community support liaisons. A lot of it is done, I try to attend any kind of event to which I'm invited if there is, I was just at one at AALV around communities forum and safety and a survey that had been done, close relationship with the folks who run AALV and talk to them and have spoken to them regularly over this past month. So those kinds of efforts, we would love to get our community barbecue back up and running and we have a real intention to make that happen this coming year. But I'd love to talk to you, Romeo, at Lankton, see if you've got other ideas or you can connect with Sarah Tim and talk about some of those with her in order to, that's our PIO, community engagement coordinator in order to figure out where we can go with some of those. Thank you. Madison, one second though, I just want everyone to know we have about 10 minutes left, so just a little expectation management. Please, Madison. Thank you. Thanks everyone for being here. Two quick questions. One to you, Chief Murad, and one to you, Senator Baruth. Chief Murad, I know you, with your staff limitations, you're focused on drug trafficking. Are you now or are you considering a partnership with Vermont State Police or other neighboring police departments to focus on drug market intervention? That's gonna make people feel safe that you are disrupting that. It'll also signal to these folks that Vermont is not open for drug traffic and gun violence also. So any towns dealing with all of these things. And then Senator Baruth, for you, you talked about, you wanna answer first? I'll be very, yeah, and then I have a quick question for you. Yeah, so we used to hear that from dealers that we'd arrest that they would not deal in Burlington because they knew they were gonna get caught. We are focused on that. We do partner with DEA, ATF agents, the Vermont State Police, their drug task force. We certainly partner with them. But we're facing a lot of challenges as well. We have a certain number of investigators and they have a certain amount of bandwidth. And unfortunately with major crimes, we pull those investigators from drug investigations to help us with the murder investigations. But I'll ask you a question. I mean, if you could pull $1,000 out of an ATM in New York City, drive it to Burlington and it magically turned into $4,000, would you do it? And then that's what we're facing. We have a drug market that you can make a substantial amount of money in Burlington. There's a high demand for it based on our population. They're willing to pay the money. So the drug dealers know that. And that's what we're facing. But we are triaging our resources towards those out-of-state dealers who are profiting off of that user population in our community and poisoning them. And we're focusing on anyone that might be violence prone as well. But again, we only have so many people, but we are trying to disrupt where we can. I'd love to continue that conversation because I think it's great. I also think if you could get some of your supervisory folks, not the sergeants, because I know they know all the things on what's happening, but just more people in uniform just to pop up. So they know you can't hang out in your city market and at gas station. Disruption, disruption, disruption. Okay, thank you. Senator Baruth, you mentioned that $5 million for innovation. And Chief Mirage, as you said, law enforcement alone is not gonna do this. And you also mentioned your concern for our young people. When we closed down Memorial Auditorium 10 plus years ago, we lost a crucial community space, not just for the adults in this community, but the Office of Youth was lost. And now we're dealing with our children who don't have high school, who were then moved, their development was disrupted because of COVID. They lost their social connections. And now they're in a windowless high school with no sunlight. I grew up in Alaska. That is damaging to your psyche. So community, let's take some of that money and create community spaces in each neighborhood accessible to every person. Not just find your way to the old North End Community Center, which actually is a model and should be stood up in every ward, every neighborhood where people can walk to, and let's reestablish Office of Youth. Our kids need connection. They need to belong. And right now, unfortunately, they're finding not so good examples and places to be. So. Well, I'll just say a couple of things. First of all, my daughter just graduated from Macy's last year. And it's an incredible thing that we have a high school going up. And I just wanted to point out that in the budget that we passed in June, and we overrode the governor, there was $16 million to remediate and remove the contaminated material from the site. So that was $16 million that Burlington taxpayers didn't have to pick up. The other thing I will say is the state came through with $3 million to originally move the kids into Macy's. That was something that needed to happen. Even my daughter admitted that, that there was no other option. To your other point about the community spaces, I think that's a fabulous idea. And right now the Department of Health is managing that $5 million fund, the Community Violence Reduction Fund. So they have currently 30 requests for proposals from different communities around the state. What they're doing, since they had 30, they're dividing it into two cohorts of 15 each. They'll do this year 15, and then the following year they'll fund 15 more. I think that's completely inadequate. And so what we're gonna do when I get back in January, we have budget adjustment. It's called in January and February where we true up accounts and we pump out money where it's desperately needed. So I will commit to you right now that I will do my best to get more money in that Community Violence Reduction Fund so that we don't limit ourselves to 15 a year but we more fill the need as it emerges. So if the city council wants, and the mayor's office wanna put forward an RFP where they, or a proposal with some meat on it, where they flesh out that proposal, there'll be money there. Great. And one last thing, we need to get happiness light truly into that high school. It's windowless. It is causing great harm to our kids. Fair enough. Thank you. Just letting people know we only have a few minutes. Let's take three more questions. Hello, hi. All eyes on me. Okay, great. I just wanna remind people that Burlington is a city and no city in the world can thrive without feminine, hot, beautiful girls. That's just a fact. You can't argue that. All cities in the world possess them. And I don't know why Burlington lives in delusion as if they don't need them. Back in the day, I grew up in South Burlington but I had to turn my back on them after I was falsely incarcerated by a masculine woman who is more dangerous in gunfire, honestly. And I wanna know, what are we doing to protect the feminine women of Burlington girls that wear Lulu lemons and go to yoga classes and drink that smoothie drink at that smoothie place over there? What are we doing to protect them? Cause like I said, I was falsely incarcerated not because I'm lawless, because I'm feminine. And I'm sure if I had a masculine officer that would never happen because people know and men in the presence of a feminine woman, they melt. So I wanna know, what are we doing to protect the feminine women of Vermont? Because like I said, I'm in Montpelier. You've seen me there in Montpelier holding it down for the hot girls in Montpelier and it's a struggle. Girls are not waist training. We're not doing Pilates anymore. I don't know what's happening. And I've been studying Madeline Coonan. That's why I'm wearing the pearls. The woman has always been feminine. So I don't know when we stop believing that women need to be the man and all this stuff. We were designed, my ministry is femininity. That's why I was sent on this earth. It's to bring heaven on earth. And in heaven, there's a bunch of feminine women. So we're trying to do that on earth. So I wanna know, what are we doing to protect the feminine women? Because we need protection like the other girl who spoke. I know a bunch of hot girls who were saying that we've been stopped. So I'm hearing that your person is about women. Excuse me, I'm not done. See what I'm talking about masculine energy. You didn't interrupt anybody but me. Okay, I'm not done. Again, because a real feminine woman would just let a woman be, okay? Once again, what are we doing? Because again, I was falsely incarcerated because of that. Not because I'm lawless, because I'm a 4.0 student, you know, that girl, you know? Brains and everything. But yet, looking Karen Paul, she was not accepted because she's a feminine woman. Like that's why we're really here. What are we doing to protect, especially the men? You know, I don't mind officers that are female, but let them be females that just happen to be police officers or not females that want to be men. That's very, very dangerous. You can say what you want, argue with your mother, you should really argue with your father. You can now answer my question. It's a real question. Well, I certainly hope that we are protecting feminine women. I hope that we're protecting everybody. I hope that we are giving everybody the space to be who they want to be. That's right. Whether that is a feminine woman or a masculine woman or a person who wants to be any kind of person. I think our obligation is to protect every single person equally. So I don't actually have any specific plans around any one group. This country. Go ahead, Mr. Mike. Lieutenant, sorry. I second that. Oh, interesting. Senator, with your daughter and everything? I think at all levels, state municipality, everyone deserves equal treatment and it's protected by the Vermont Constitution and the US Constitution. Great, that's all I needed to hear from the Senator. Thank you. Toodles. Hello, everyone. My name is Jules Soichi. I'm a leader of the Congolese community. I am a producing manager of African Veradi Show, which I provide health educations and health promotion to New American community. And also, I am a member of Trassee Community Voice of Burlington. So I'm gonna talk about immigrant situation here. I think we are facing as a public health expert because I've got my master's degree in public health and in Congo, I am a medical doctor. So we are facing with many challenges here, which included the political situation and the leaders, a community member. So I think the best core of these challenges is the education. I think someone said there, I think it's Paul, we have to educate ourselves. So it's very hard when we were outside of the United States of America, we think when we arrive here, we can have a better life, but now it's not safe in Burlington. I've been now 10 years ago, now it's not more safe anymore. It's unacceptable. We are raising our kids and tomorrow, they're gonna commit the crime and going to jail. This is not true for the parents in our culture. We are here to raise our kids in the safe environment and tomorrow they should be the leader. Why not the police officer? Why not the mayor? Why not the senator? Why not the physician? But now with many crime in Burlington and a lot of young people, they're in jail because they didn't know the law and they are not educated. So facing with this challenge, how the immigrant community leaders, we can be involved for preventing violence because we are facing with the challenges. What you guys expect us to help. Great question. Thank you. So the director of the racial equity inclusion and belonging department of the city of Burlington, director Kim Carson is working with communities, including immigrant communities on this very topic right now. And I think that afterwards I'd love to get your information so that you could be included in the efforts that she's undertaking in that. I think that for all of us, sometimes I'm afraid that we make those connections too late. I have met frequently with the elders in the Somali Bantu community because some of the violence that occurred last year occurred among members, young members of that community. I met there with the state's attorney and with others and tried to make relationships there. But had they been in place before, would there have been a different situation? I don't know the answer to that. I do think that we want to make certain that every community in the city is heard and is included, particularly if they're things that are uniquely impacting a given community. I will also say that the city has recently launched under Kim Carson's leadership a youth violence task force that is dedicated to sort of studying this issue as well. And I can also put you in touch with her. Okay, thank you. Thank you. And good job for your hard work. Thank you. And we'll take our final question for the evening. Hi guys, my name is Morgan. I live here in Burlington with my family. I work here on Church Street. I've worked on Church Street for the last 10 years. Thanks for all the work that you're doing for the additional security that you're providing to Church Street right now. I know that's making a lot of people that have businesses downtown and work downtown feel more comfortable. Chief, you noted that there were 18, we have approval for 18 additional officers and I know you guys are working hard to hire those folks. In the interim, you said it could take a long time and that it would take an even longer time maybe to get to where you think we might need to be which is maybe above that number. Is there an opportunity or the potential to use some of that funding, some of that budget to continue to hire private security to fill the gap while we wait for those folks to be hired? So yes and no. So some of that money, city budgeting works in such a way that we're not actually budgeted for 87 and have that much money to spend that it isn't being spent because we're at 69 but we're budgeted for 87, we're not. We're budgeted for what we reasonably believed we might be able to get to in this fiscal year and that's 71 or 72. So there's not a lot of money unspent. We spent a lot of it on the Vermont State Police. There's a trooper out on the corner right now and we spent a good, I think about $100,000 on that program over the duration of it. I know that it's been 87 so far billed but I think they've actually been around a lot over the last couple of weeks and into the holiday season. It ends at the end of the calendar year but I think it'll end up being about 100 there. We generally are not, as a police department, reimbursing or paying for private security. Certainly there are other city entities that are and they are terrific partners. What we've used that money for, the money that we are not spending because certain seats are empty is being spent on overtime for officers who are here and the detriment there is that it works for a while but it also burns cops out and we're making choices. For example, tomorrow we are going to be opening a warming shelter in the city and that is something that's important with the weather is turning, we want that. I would love an officer to be stationed there on that first day just as it gets its feet under it but the marketplace detail that we have is more lucrative because it's paying the union's rate and the overtime that I'm going, that I've posted for tomorrow pays the city rate so I don't know that I'm gonna have one and the fact of the matter is we're at this place where we're sort of robbing from Peter routinely to pay Paul and so what I am trying to do is we need new people and the money that we do have available to us is being used primarily for overtime so not for private security per se. That's got to be a different piece which certainly is Kara's, certainly is, you know, Council President Paul worked with private donors to match city funds. Those are things that are important but that's not the police department's sort of preview. I will also just add to that that there is some, we need to understand that these private security officers are unarmed, they are unable to enforce our ordinances and our laws, they're unable to make arrests. Their presence is very soothing and calming and they can escort employees for example back to their cars and I think that's important and helpful but I agree with the Chief that the focus really needs to be on building back our force and that will give you and your staff, you know, the security you're looking for. Great, so everyone, I think we have come to our conclusion for the evening. I want to thank our panelists once again, Senator Baruth, Lieutenant Bellovo and Chief Murad. Thank you all for being here. And our next discussion is on the 19th. Tuesday the 19th, here. Thank you all.