 Hello everyone. Thank you for bringing this sunshine. So I want to tell you a little bit about Chief Burke. He is an insightful police leader focused on the national landscape of the profession and building a resilient organization. He's dedicated, a dedicated public servant committed to public safety, inclusion and evolving the organization to meet the needs of the community. He has a strong background in police operations, organizational management, leadership by example, with sharp focus on providing excellent police service aligned with community expectations. Please give a warm welcome to Chief Burke. Good afternoon. That's loud. I'm loud. In fact, it's rare that they actually give me a microphone. Is that better? In the back of the room, you're good? Okay. All right, so thank you for that warm introduction. I appreciate that. I think a little bit more about my background, just to give a context of how I came to be the police chief here in the city of South Burlington. Grew up in Poughkeepsie, New York. My father was a police officer in Poughkeepsie for 20 years and retired. I thought I was going to try my hand in agriculture. I went to school at Vermont Technical College after we moved to Vermont and studied ag business. I decided that that wasn't quite it for me. And found my way into policing in 1994 with the town of Woodstock Police Department in central Vermont. I was there for two years before I applied to the Burlington Police Department, where I was accepted as a new rookie in 1997. And I spent about the next 22 years there really doing every job from patrol, field training officer, detectives, drug unit, all the way up until I retired from the city of Burlington in 2018. I was the operations deputy chief of police and also served as the police department's public information officer. 2018, I was fortunate enough to be hired by the city of South Burlington as the police chief for this community and have immensely enjoyed policing in South Burlington where really the legacy of the organization has been the police really embedded in the community, understanding from residents what the expectations of the department are, and being community caretakers. And I think at this time in policing, and we'll talk about this in greater detail, there's no better foundation than I was blessed to find when I got to the organization in 2018. Having said that, get into the presentation, I felt it was important that my computer work, there we go. I think it's important to talk about what the police department actually encompasses in terms of organizational structure because oftentimes you just think of the marked police cars that you see traversing throughout the city, your officers on a sidewalk, tending to a radio call. But there's so much more to our organization than that. So this is our organizational chart. You'll see it starts with the chief. We have a deputy chief of police who is a new hire with us. His name is Sean as well, Sean Brisco. He's with us as a lateral candidate. He did his policing career in the city of Saratoga Springs, New York. We are responsible for command and control of the police department, policy, and really philosophical direction of the police department. We have a couple of team members up there with us. So we have our executive assistant that keeps us organized. And then we have our community justice center, if you're not familiar with the South Grollington Community Justice Center. It's an entity of two employees, an executive director, and then a practitioner. And what they do is offer restorative justice, alternative justice, really through restorative practice for a variety of criminal offenses, low-level disorder. And then they also offer a program called parallel justice. So if you are a victim of a crime, so your car window is smashed, your mailbox is run over, that team member calls every crime victim in the city to allow them to really some space to talk about their experience as a crime victim and then offer resources that are available to help them remedy their situation. So that group in the community justice center is really doing some fantastic work, especially on the alternative prosecution side of the equation, where we are trying to get particularly first-time offenders into the restorative process where they can understand how an impulsive decision really negatively impacted not only the crime victim or the affected party, but more broadly the community as a whole. And how the community is represented in the process is we have a strong core of volunteers that support the community justice center and they sit on panels and represent the community in their interest in how crime is felt across town, if you will. So very proud of the work they're doing. Going south from the command level, you'll see we have two lieutenants, so on your left and on your right we have a lieutenant over the patrol division. The patrol division right now is staffed with a total of 21 police officers and those 21 police officers provide 24-7 police coverage to the city 365 days a year. They work a 12-hour shift with fixed days on and days off. What this affords us to do is with low numbers provide that level of service to the city 24-7 coverage year round and it also provides us an opportunity to do that in teams. So each team is staffed by one sergeant who is the person in charge and three officers and that aligns with the three patrol areas that we have in the city. Essentially they are we call them the south which is Shelburne Road. We have the middle which we are conveniently in which is essentially everything from the double tree down to Shelburne Town Line on Dorset Street and then everything kind of east toward the airport from 116 is the east patrol area. So that's how we divide up the city so there isn't three cops all sitting in one spot that they're out dispersed and can respond to calls for service as needed in an efficient manner. Also assigned to our patrol division is our animal control officer. The animal control officer is actually a contract vendor that we use and they provide a little bit of proactive patrol and then a lot of follow-up on things related to animal bites, dogs at large, aggressive dogs that kind of thing. On the right side of the chart you'll see we have a lieutenant over administration. In administration we have a sergeant responsible for our dispatch services. So the police department houses the emergency communication or 911 center for the city and we dispatch for both police, fire, and fire obviously has EMS. And that team has a total of seven dispatchers and we staff that center 24-7-365 as well. That sergeant is also responsible for all of our in-service training so as police officers in the state of Vermont in order to maintain your certification you have to have a minimum amount of training hours per year and depending on the year odd year or even year suggest the disciplines in which those trainings need to be administered and we are accountable to the Vermont Criminal Justice Council for that and that is that sergeant's focus. The next sergeant over here is BCI that's the Bureau of Criminal Investigation. So they do everything from pre-employment background checks to murder investigations. So we have a sergeant and currently two detectives that work specifically in South Burlington on cases such as that. And then we also have one detective assigned to the Chittenden unit for special investigations what that is the countywide group and they're subscribing police departments Burlington, South Burlington, the Vermont State Police, UVM, Colchester. We all have detectives there and they work on serious sexual assault in serious child abuse investigations. Really tough work and we have a detective that is assigned there for four-year increments because that is probably really what I would call the rev limiter on how long an employee can actually be really embedded in that type of work. And then the last detective position here is a member that we have assigned to the Vermont State Police Drug Task Force so the state police administers drug task force in the state and it's a really good way to regionalize, collaborate, enforce, multiply through these teams and investigate mid to upper level drug traffickers. This column here we have a vacant sergeant position unfortunately and that person is supposed to be supervising our youth service officer. Currently because of our staffing levels we only have one youth service officer and she is responsible for high school, middle school, the three grammar schools in the city as well as the alternative schools, the Rice Memorial and others that are here. So she's been working really hard and we hope to get her some help soon and then our traffic safety officer who is a uniform police officer but his existence really is related to developing data related to traffic incidents, designing enforcement plans or working with the Department of Public Works on engineering strategies in order to make our roads safer. Then lastly over here we have our records division as you can imagine like every government entity we amass all kinds of records many of which need to be filed with the court through a discovery process others have to be accounted for according to the Secretary of State's retention schedule and we have two folks that are doing that work as well as responding to the public records requests that we get. We get about 800 requests from the public on our records and those records could include anything from a crash report, incident report, court affidavit or any number of our video sources that we have now body worn camera footage or cruiser camera footage can all be requested from the public. And then lastly this acronym here is our human trafficking case manager. We have a grant funded position through the state of Vermont and this is an advocate that does direct service work with survivors of human trafficking. What human trafficking looks like in the state of Vermont right now is really the sex trade related to substance use disorder. So those individuals engaging in the sex trade in order to sustain their drug habit in the coercive elements that keep them in that world. So that's kind of us in a nutshell. There's about 54 of us in the in the whole organization and as it stands right now we have eight vacancies, eight police officer vacancies. So 20 percent of what we're supposed to have or I'm sorry yeah 20 percent of what we're supposed to have in terms of sworn police officers are vacant positions right now and that's really a phenomenon that we're seeing or a trend that we're seeing across the country. So you know how do you go about running a police department? And I know that everyone really focuses on the tragic event of 2020 and the death of George Floyd but really there were other watershed moments leading up to 2020 where the profession should have been much much more responsive and actually back in 2015 President Obama recognized this and established a commission that published a report. The report was entitled 21st century policing and really what the commission was was six experts that went through and identified what was going well and what wasn't going well and it gave police leaders a playbook if you will and they kept it simple for for our profession which I appreciate and they published six pillars of policing or contemporary policing to kind of guide ways in which law enforcement executives could take this schematic compared to the needs the public safety policing needs of your individual communities and figure out how to lay those over one another. So I just kind of want to walk through what we've been up to since 2018 in terms of the pillars in 21st century policing here in South Burlington. pillar one building trust and legitimacy a lot of this comes down to how you just simply relate with the with the public at large and being approachable and also being responsive. So like when I talk about we have an employee dedicated to providing public records in a timely fashion that's an excellent way to be responsive to your community. Another way is to be very proactive in ways that you communicate with the with the public when there is something on the national radar that's gone terribly wrong in policing like what we saw in Memphis and getting information out to the to our community to our constituents about how we would deal with that situation and oftentimes what we've seen in my statements are really an indictment against some of the things that we've seen going on in this country. Policing in other areas in the south and in the west far different than in the northeast. Far difference in terms of philosophical alignment. Another way to build trust and legitimacy is also keeping abreast of best practices in training and in policy and we'll talk a little bit more about that but in really ways that have been meaningful to the community of South Groenton we have one of the most restrictive fair and impartial policing policies in the state of Vermont where we do not cooperate actively with immigration issues civil immigration issues and that's really meaningful to the state of Vermont when you think about the number of migrant laborers that we have working on our dairy farms or what we see a lot in this city are people that are housed here in hotels to revamp those hotels or revamp a McDonald's who may not be here legally but it's a civil violation and not a criminal violation so we're pretty proud of that work as well. We'll go into pillar two policy and oversight again I touched on this it's critically important to look at high liability areas where you need to make adjustment in policy and where you need to orient your supervisors to pay attention to field operations like I said we have a sergeant on each shift that works with that team of officers so that group of four together professionally for a year and that gives us a great opportunity to have a good barometer on each shift of how employees are doing in terms of early intervention if our policies are working and they're working in a way that we're trying to meet the police expect the policing expectations of the community and if not let's recalibrate look at best practices around the country and implement those here pillar three use of technology and social media so there's there's two things really kind of layered here a way that we implemented technology is in 20 must have been 21 now we finally got body-worn cameras on all of our police officers as well as they are fully integrated with our cruiser cameras and the system is completely intuitive what do i mean by that so if an officer turns on their blue lights in response to a call for service once the blue lights are triggered the cruiser camera comes on the body camera comes on and everything's recorded so we can offer going back to pillar one a complete record so it is a perspective when we look at video but a complete independent record of that police public interaction and that is work that we're very very very proud of it's also a system that is state-of-the-art in terms that it is cloud-based digital evidence and it literally transmits through a router off the end up to the antenna in the police car to the cloud in the moment and officers that are on scene we can actually almost watch it in real time if we it's super technology social media we all know that younger generations are that's where we find them right that's how we transmit information to folks and it's funny to watch kind of the demographics we have several different platforms that we leverage at the south brooklyn police department facebook a little bit older right front page front porch forum a little bit older than that but then down in the bottom space we have instagram and snapchat until a lesser degree x which was formerly twitter we we leverage all of those platforms for a variety of reasons one we you will see we use x formerly twitter as a way to get press notifications out in in concert with our standard media release that we all see on the television news but then we use facebook and instagram as a way to socialize the police department to let the community know what's important to the police department highlight some of our work and we've also been really kind of focused in the same space on our recruitment front because it's where we find applicants we still go to job fairs we still do some classic advertisement but a lot of people find us on social media pillar four community policing and crime reduction community policing is it's a great term but if you've been in this business long enough you realize that it's how it all started right sir robert peel talked about the police of the public the public or the police i wouldn't have a job if we didn't have taxpayers and uh we we need to have our ideals in that regard aligned and i'd rather call community policing relationship-based policing because that's what it's all about and when i think about how i started my career in the town of woodstock very small community and we had kind of strict marching orders from the chief police and things we would do there's a dedicated spot downtown where you park the police car and on the evening shift you check every single commercial door and during the day you would do the same thing and you would greet all the tourists to make sure the parking was in order that's just a form of community policing right when i went to burlington i spent a number of my years in patrol assigned to the old north end which is a pretty tough neighborhood and at the time what i quickly realized is that although folks are down on their luck a little bit at times they really appreciate especially when you have a degree of criminality in a neighborhood there's a fond appreciation for the police department and there's a unique opportunity to really build some meaningful relationships in that regard that one are just rewarding right as humans be able to relate to folks but it also cultivates information right and it helps when you're trying to figure out the major crime in the neighborhood so when i think about that and i think about the decades of policing that went on before when people would grow up in a town or a city go and be a police officer walk the beat maybe many of you in this room had that type of experience yourselves or knew a police officer like that that's really where society wants our profession to get back to through the 70s uh they made us more efficient they put us in cars they gave us radios they gave us more and more technology and they employed fewer of us in a lot of in a lot of instances so that's a delicate balance but we are doing some very intentional things here in south burlington we have uh footbeats that we assign university mall market street feral street anywhere that we can interact with people business owners residents and socialize us as humans just out doing a job and again it's easier to meet before a crisis and then work through that together than it is to meet during a crisis and try to figure out are we adversaries or can we get along and collaborate crime reduction we'll talk about that in a next slide so or five training and education really if if you uh have un poorly trained police officers or scared police officers in the field they make worse decisions when they're under stress so we focus a lot of time on training our police officers so they know that they're confident intelligent enough and fooled to deal with whatever they're faced with and that's critically important education just a brief example of that we do have a program where we have a tuition reimbursement so officers that come to us that may be having quite completed their college degree or want a master's degree they're able to do so you know time allows and we will help with their tuition costs in that regard and then lastly uh pillar six this is uh that one that's extraordinarily for an officer wellness and safety we'll talk about wellness first this is the whole employee so we have a department clinician in a concert with a peer support team of employees and we talk about um mental health and also situational kind of depression if you will this the cumulative stress of being in public safety can be a lot over time and everyone kind of has their own breaking point and we recognize now that if we do a little bit of preventative work in that regard we don't lose employees we don't lose employees um too soon or too bad decisions that they either make professionally where we see it in use of force outcomes or personally in medicating themselves with substances or alcohol so uh we've got a lot going on positive in that regard we also have a fit force program where we afford officers as time allows up to two hours per week to work out on duty we have a beautiful state of the art gym and police headquarters and many of our officers help themselves stay well not only physically and mentally through uh exercise weightlifting and that kind of stuff so that's a little bit of our work on officer wellness and in terms of officer safety that really comes down to having enough cops well supervised and trained cops and then all the latest technology that you need to do this job in order to have the best possible outcomes when we're kind of faced with a lot of unknown i spoke about this challenge a little bit already i gotta move around i'm sorry and i'm gonna try not to trip over one of these cords and embarrass myself recruitment and retention of staff has been uh one of the biggest challenges in the profession across the country a little bit of that our numbers here you can see in this graph starting in 2020 it was the last time in recent history that we were able to actually retire or have three officers resign and then hire that number back and uh we became very less fortunate after that in 21 we had four separations we're only able to hire one 2022 which was really the height of the number of officers available for retirement post 2020 we had six i believe 90 of those were retirements leave we were only able to add three and this is a trend that's been very very troubling it got better in 2023 even despite uh despite kind of the deficit that we were coming out of we were able to hire eight police officers at a time where we only had five either retire or resign so right now like i said we still have eight vacancies not everyone makes it through training and that's what we saw in our big year in 23 when we were able to hire eight employees just because we hire you as a police officer that doesn't mean you've made it through the through the finish line yet you have to go to the Vermont police academy it's a 17 week residential academic and physical program that's kind of it's based in a paramilitary structure it's pretty rigorous and then you come back to your home agency in here in south growington we do 14 weeks of field training before those employees go on a single radio call by themselves why is that important why are we investing uh the time this is a high liability career this is a career where we're putting public safety professionals in the street that are making life and death decisions they're making decisions about restricting uh individuals constitutional rights we have to get this right in the bedrock of getting that right is having a good training so again we're about 20 down if you know anyone that's looking for a fantastic job we're open to interviews right now and we're looking to hire up to four officers in July who would then begin the academy process this august what do we do day to day so we respond to everything that you can imagine from barking dogs to people fighting on the sidewalk to people feeling from the university mall you name it we do it what's that look like in terms of numbers so again starting out in 2020 you'll see that we were doing about 13 000 incidents per year dwindles down a little bit in 2021 and that trajectory stays uh on the decline in the 2022 now i want you to remember the graph previous to this one where that illustrated kind of our available headcount and number of officers we actually have to assign to these officers and there's a correlation as we have less officers essentially we are doing what we have to do and we're not doing anything proactive and when i say proactive what do i mean less foot patrols less engagements like this that we measure with incidents less traffic stops to try to keep our city's uh streets safe and uh all the assorted things that you would that you could imagine that a police officer might do while they're on duty with their free time what this is showing is that we're barely keeping pace with our radio calls and then again as our head count began to came come up our incident number uh began to came up began to increase as well finishing with uh about 11 500 incidents in 2023 similar trend with our arrest line i know these numbers are small just over a thousand arrests in 2020 for the year 2023 645 arrests total what the difference there is more proactive more traffic stops more dui apprehensions at night less cops on nights fewer duis fewer proactive interventions responsive arrests 645 what's consuming the availability of our bandwidth day to day and a trend that has been identified in our data graph on your right a met social service needs what this really is is a catchment of five incident types the incidents that we respond to involving overdose mental health crisis welfare check suicidal persons and lastly intoxication and you'll see coming out of the pandemic in 2020 about 749 calls for service related to those five catchment areas up to just over a thousand 2023 what we see right now is overwhelmed systems of care be it related to substance use disorder alcohol dependency in particular most acutely in those suffering either from formal mental health diagnoses in crisis or situational crisis and unfortunately let's talk about the fortune side of that how do we respond to these incidents in a way that it just isn't a badge and a gun we are one of the nine towns in chitin county that subscribe to the howard center community outreach model what those folks are less than clinicians field-based folks that are really fluent in the services that are available they co-respond with law enforcement or with fire to these incidents that i just mentioned in the catchment area and then try to reunite generally it's reunite because folks have slipped away from services that they're familiar with or are new new to the community and don't know what's available it works pretty good until about five in the evening and then as the programs all closed down there's only one entity left now that we can try to get these folks to unfortunately it's the emergency room at fletcher allen and they are totally overwhelmed and it's it's not the hospital's fault our mental health system of care in this state needs in my opinion some uh re-engineering and reinvestment in that regard prevailing crime trends in the city and again i apologize for the size of the graph i realized it's small what we've seen coming out of the pandemic are exponential increases and essentially a few categories so when we talk about larceny that's just theft so a bicycle is stolen from somewhere a handbag is stolen out of a shopping cart at hana ferds that kind of thing so we've seen double digit increases on a percentile basis in larceny in retail theft it's really been exponential in 2020 we took 269 retail theft complaints up to almost 400 in 2023 i'll tell you this year's data we're trending even higher stolen vehicles this has been a troubling crime trend across the country but here locally it's one that's really been impactful as well where we were doing you know 23 stolen cars in 2020 and now we are up to 124 in 2023 what what the message that we're trying to get out about stolen cars is there is no stolen car ring that's going on in chitlin county this isn't like the movie gone in 60 seconds these are folks that are leaving their cars unlocked with the keys in them and folks that are out and about potentially stealing from cars will occasionally take a car and then go out and say do a gas drive off at a local convenience store commit a retail theft commit a burglary and the first great lead that we have in any one of those crimes is the video image of the car that was stolen so that lead kind of evaporates quickly this crime trend of stolen cars could be mitigated almost instantly back to 2020 and before levels if folks would just take their keys and lock their cars i know i know you laugh but people leave their keys and they're unlocked cars so retail theft obviously south brolinton is kind of a retail hub retail heavyweight if you will we've seen dramatic increases in the number of retail thefts related to uh you know instances at the mall lows many many times these are substance use disorder folks and they're stealing in order to buy drugs we're seeing a bit of organized criminality in this regard where drug traffickers want specific goods so instead of taking money for drugs they will put on out on the street word i want you know these sneakers in mass quantities or whatever their good might be and uh so those folks that are dependent on substances will go to university mall or you name it and commit retail theft after retail theft i don't know how much you follow some of the legislation that is afoot but there is uh our representative here in south brolinton martin lond has a bill that's going to make it through crossover where it'll allow prosecutors to aggregate misdemeanor offenses of retail theft that occur over a short period of time in order to enhance those to a felony which we hope will be a deterrent but a big challenge right now is with our recidivist population our bail structure in terms of a statue doesn't allow for folks to be incarcerated for just simply committing the same crime over and over and over again you have to commit a serious act of violence in order for the court to impose bail or be a risk of flight and many of our recidivists are folks that have lived in the community for decades and uh it's very troubling for our merchant community to see the same faces time and time again victimizing their business it's also demoralizing for our staff to have to go out and really replicate the same investigations over and over because a lot of these folks and when i talk about the recidivist community i'm talking about a number of people that is less than 50 might even be less than 30 are driving these numbers through the roof and they're quite bold about saying yeah just give me my citation the court will let me out and i'm just going to get a sweetheart plea deal because the court has a backlog so that's been really a source of frustration not only for our profession but certainly for our business community and then lastly burglary i like to highlight burglary numbers have been fairly static and what i mean by a burglary is when someone actually forces their way into a place that they don't have license or privilege to be in and commits a theft and in chitin county i've been here like 27 years now you can almost predict those trends on who gets out of prison that went to prison for burglary it's one of those crime appetites that never seems to go away and i've never understood that some of the capital improvements that we've made at the police department we're investing in hybrid police car technology now so these cars they cost a little bit more they're hybrid in nature they're not plug-in we need that because we can't always depend on a replacement cycle throughout our patrol days of when they could actually be plugged in but what this technology really does is manages the amount they idle and that is where we're really inefficient in unnecessarily causing greenhouse gas these these cruisers we have four or five of them now out in the patrol fleet they've been out for just under a year i'm really anxious to see the fuel consumption data i realize that there's like different metrics in trying to be more green but i think we're going to see improved fuel consumption and i know because of less idling we're going to contribute less to greenhouse gases i mentioned that we have or that we're home to the emergency communications center the 911 center so up until 2018 we were still really relying on a model both of infrastructure and personnel to operate a police department in a very small fire department the fire department has grown exponentially over the years to meet the service demands of the community to include paramedicine and ambulances and we needed to bring our operation up to speed so we just finished last week a major renovation of taking our two we call them consoles but essentially dispatching stations we revamp the room we have four state-of-the-art technology four state-of-the-art dispatch stations in that space now all the latest technology computer aided dispatch for fire and ems full video integration throughout police headquarters and city hall and ergonomically friendly furniture for our dispatchers so this investment today was made possible through some arpa dollars and also some budget surplus from last year in this center will serve the city well into the future the way it's been engineered spoke a little bit about emerging emerging issues prime trends as it relates to our staff our our census really and i just like this graph because the top line is the growth of city population so 1970 sorry so 1970 10 000 residents and we're up to just shy of 21 000 residents now the green line is sworn officer staffing levels so 19 officers assigned to the police department 1970 to a peak of 42 officers in 2010 we're authorized 40 police officers today we've got 33 employed what's fascinating is the blue line the blue line is our annual incident count so in 1970 we had uh less than a thousand incidents you can see that we peaked when we had available staff up around 16 500 incidents per year again we're doing more more engagements with youth more engagements with the community such as this much more proactive enforcement in terms of traffic which is a major concern in this community more foot patrols just doing a better job for the community but then as our census begins to fall off you see our incident count fall off in this delta here between our population and the number of incidents that we're handling that's a point of saturation we simply don't have enough to provide the same enough people to provide the same level of police service that we were in 2010 but we are able to tend to all of our calls so i'll close with this other communities around us took drastic measures took away night shift in shellburn limited a night shift to one or two officers in the city of burlington our staff wouldn't have that they stepped up they were on a 10-hour schedule in uh 2021 when in 2022 when our headcount fell drastically we pivoted immediately to a 12-hour schedule and we maintain the same level of police officers that we needed to provide the city with the service that they expect and also the safety and numbers that our team makes but with that pick them three minutes early you're perfect thank you but i'd love to answer any questions microphone behind you just just talk can you hear me i love the police but i love policing south rowington i have a question about intake um my daughter and i witnessed someone going through a car and and opening trying to open and we called and the intake person took so long that by the time she was they had taken some merchandise from ours um didn't drive a car off but disappeared so is that something that could be expedited a little that's a great question so and that did you call 911 or did you call us direct okay thank you for bringing that point up so uh in the state of vermont we have centralized 911 so if you dial 911 your call is going to one of six public safety answering points throughout the state and they have a script that they have to run through before they transfer that call to us uh it works really well in rural communities where uh you know dps technology isn't the best addresses are a little bit loose it doesn't serve us all that well uh and sometimes we are behind now i i was a brollington cop when we went to this statewide system and i remember the days where i they would get on the radio and say disturbance on row street and you could hear the 911 bell ringing in the background over the radio and we were on calls like that this this system of response makes us a little bit slower and uh it's also a bit fickle for us because we need to gather enough information to validate the call understand what we're responding to figure out if the person that's reporting this is willing to be a witness uh while dispatching the units oftentimes under our current staffing model we'll only have one dispatcher on and they're extraordinarily talented but if that comes in at the same time as a fire call it's very challenging that's why we built the center out with a goal of i missed this part the goal of having at least two dispatchers on at all times so we can do a lot of that simultaneous work please repeat your quite the questions if you can some people can't hear them thanks you talked about recruitment problems have you looked at the compensation is that an issue so we have fallen behind on the starting salary and our collective bargaining agreement is up in about a little over a year so we're going to start that process soon but it's uh you know it's expensive to live here but it's expensive to tax our residents but i will say that we do have to raise our starting salary this is all with the hope that service minded folks are going to step forward too there's just sheer lack of applicants and other police departments like the Burlington police department that offers a starting salary that's about almost almost twenty thousand dollars greater than ours they're facing the same kind of numbers but they have a political situation that makes it a little less appealing to go police there as well but we are examining that benefits are fantastic so uh they are yeah so the question first one was how's your salary next one is benefits benefits are fantastic generational difference so policing public safety still offers a pension but sometimes when you sit down with someone that's in their 20s and you say like i'll tell them like yeah i'm in my 30th year they look at me like i'm nuts and generationally i don't know if the pension is going to be as appealing as portability to the to this next group i don't know it's gonna be interesting to see what it goes but our benefits are far superior and we try to really advertise that when we're seriously recruiting we tell folks don't look at that salary line let's look at total compensation i'm coming hello i'll ask my question EMT call all right so give me one second so uh why the why do fire trucks go with EMS calls i am not the fire chief but i know this answer so what happens is our our ambulances in this county are so busy that oftentimes if you call for an ambulance in the community you might be waiting for an ambulance to come from shellburn or uvm all of our professional firefighters here in south burlington are cross-trained at minimum their EMTs many of them are paramedics so they're staffing the fire trucks and can provide that life-saving aid in the moment while you're waiting so oftentimes it appears to be a co-response and it is but that is the rationale behind it my background is fire rescue and i was with the police for a number of years in an srt team as a medic and i just wanted to ask you something i noticed when i was with my department in miami florida is that a lot of people were coming to our fire department and our rescue and our police department from other smaller departments um do you have people leaving your department or i know you're people coming from smaller departments around over mont two-year department but any of uh do you have a trend of any of your people leaving to go to larger places with a better paycheck and all that so great question and the question is what what does it look like for laterals so people that are police officers moving throughout different agencies so being the second largest in the state but on the national scale we're actually a mid-sized department on the national scale with 40 officers we do benefit oftentimes we'll have folks from smaller agencies come to us which is fantastic we also develop fantastic employees that go on to be federal agents and that's really been a spot that we've seen folks go to we've also seen senior members of the department go into regulatory roles in law enforcement so like in this state uh the secretary of state office has criminal investigators so it's the same pay same pension but Monday through friday not working the street anymore uh department of liquor control and other entities so um we don't see a lot of concern in those trends the concern that i see is the folks that do this almost like when you enlist in the military you know you're young you have this sense of service you sign up for four to six years and then you're like okay i got that out of my system now i'm going to go in the private sector and we're starting to see more of that creep into policing in the stolen car category what is the recovery rate so our recovery rate is really high because the interest isn't in doing anything with the car so again stolen car rate high recovery rate really high the only problem or challenge i should say is that when the cars are recovered because of the prevalence of the opioid crisis people are getting their cars back they're filled with property that was probably stolen that hasn't been reported stolen needles used glassy bags from harrell in that kind of thing and usually an empty tank of gas that's usually when it's time to steal the next car that's unlocked with the keys in it i'm curious about the participation of in this case your south burlington police department with significant changes in in the city landscape last night i became aware on tv maybe a lot of other people knew it already that there's a big plan for growth in south burlington and so i'm kind of curious at what point in that are you brought in or is it on a consultation basis on budget items sort of broken out as as somebody feels inclined to call you up and ask you to come in and talk or is it structured in some kind of uh ongoing way so that your staffing needs for one thing could be built into that that's a great question so how do we marry staff levels with development in the city which development has been dramatic so there is um there is a process that is laid out through act 250 where public safety officials have to sign off on the bottom line to say we've reviewed the schematic of the plan and we can or cannot provide police service to that project so we are automatically involved in that our planning and zoning office has been tremendously busy but they definitely bring us in proactively after they've gotten the sketch in so we can begin to think about it it's really important on the fiery ms side when you think about like radius swings and getting the apparatus in with us it really comes down to what is the scale of the project and what is the intended use of the project you know i am very proud of the service city that is building a lot of more available or affordable housing but oftentimes certain projects will demand more services by way of example we have the beacon the former home on shelburn road where that is transitional folks are coming from being houseless that's like their first step to try to get stabilized to move into long-term housing and oftentimes if the wrong person moves in we go there a lot similar to the former whole home on wiliston road until building management gets the chi just right in the building oftentimes we'll have a lot of responses or we'll see folks that are suffering with mental health crisis without the appropriate supports and again after hours a lot of a lot of phones go to voicemail except for hours we end up waiting into those spaces but we find success in partnering with the leadership team to those entities so like cht we work really really hard to have good working relationships with all the building managers people that are on the ground and then try to wed services to that but are we necessarily keeping pace with the level of growth in terms of our available officers we're not but it's hard to ask for more officers when i've got a vacancies but we do talk about it a lot and city council and city management are acutely aware that as the city grows at the rate that it is now all services are going to have to be scaled i have to be just slid by the mic i'm used to calling on people so uh in your talk shon you talked a little bit your experience is mainly in new england and vermont you made a comment that perhaps policing this is done differently in other parts of the country and you said new england seems to be a in your mind to be a similar way but other departments west coast south everybody's got the same rules right same constitution but i'll tell you the tactics and philosophy in your organizational culture vastly different and what's the point that i want to highlight um on the page here is that we have to be responsive to what we see in the media for things that have gone wrong and have an explanation as to how we would have done it differently and then really a track record of evidence practice that we do do a different yeah okay thank you thank you hi am i on you're on i have two questions um is there people are changing careers midway and i was wondering is there an age limit to where somebody can apply to be in the police force and the other part of that is how many women do you have out of these 40 people that are in police work yeah so uh two great questions one is a reminder your first one age we'd like you to be 21 there's no maximum age okay we'd like you to be 21 so uh great question follow up one of our recent hires is a fellow that lives here in town he's spent a long career in sales he's about 40 he just became a police officer that is uh that's like eureka gold when we can find that lives in town with life experience generally we're um the folks that are drawn to public uh safety like myself fresh out of college very little life experience uh but ready to go and we've got to figure out how to harness that train it supervise it and develop it into being great police officers and then future leaders the question about women on the police force is uh is an excellent one because there's a lot of research being done right now about women potentially even being better or more effective police officers than men because they're not uh so quick to act they're not uh they perhaps react differently when challenged we are fortunate enough to have uh five women on our staff but i will say that this this is a demographic that we see once the family begins to evolve and there's kids in play and shift work is really tugging at the demands of the family many many times we see maternal instinct take over and we lose really great qualified women the jobs where they can be it's more reliable to be at home it's fascinating to me that this happens because my wife is a nurse so uh back in 1998 i was bringing a person suffering in crisis from north street burlington up to the emergency room and up on colchester avenue i called it on the radio the radio is squawked back and said that woman was just released from the emergency room they said don't bring her back so well there's no other place to go so i'll see him in a minute and i got up there and there was this uh i would say i got us who is now my wife that came out to throw me out of the ER so uh but again it's a long funny way of telling you that nursing is a 24 seven career that is in large number women and that works policing is a 24 seven career that in large number is men and i can't figure it out why can you comment a little more about you mentioned that that's called catch and release like what's the solution i mean that's must be maddening i do like the fish that way but i don't like the police that way and so i'm not a proponent of long incarcerated sentences but what i am a proponent of is accountability and right now the community the criminal justice system is simply too lethargic and when offenders are really calculating the risk if i do this what's the likelihood i'm going to be caught and then what's the likelihood i'm actually going to have any form of punishment right now the likelihood of being caught in this community is high the likelihood of any swift punishment corrective action so that's a challenge and i will say that it's really we found it in this bail uh statute that we have in the state where you can't be held for committing the same crime time and time again it strikes me as though that if you've gone out and stolen from target on dorset street ten times in the month it's time for a judge to say you know what you're not getting what i'm telling you you need a little bit of time in the jail setting to see if we can figure you out so then you we can adjudicate your case find you know kind of identify the root cause of wire wire criminality is presenting and try to address that and our system is just not it's not there yet and with the backlog of cases post-covid i don't know if you've heard these numbers in the in the press but there is just shy of 4 000 pending cases in this county and about a thousand fifteen hundred of those are from back 2020 and moving forward and if you think about the number of trials the court can actually hold there's no way so people that are justice involved or recidivist they know that the plea deal is just going to get sweeter in the end because there's no space on the trial docket for them you know hopefully through this legislative session we'll see some tweaks to the bail law you know hopefully through the budget process we'll see some investments in terms of additional judges and whatever the prosecutors need to kind of clear this docket off and then maybe we can get out a more nimble system our hope through our work in the community justice center is early intervention with first time offenders through the restorative process if they can truly understand the negative impact the global negative impact that that decision has had it is shown been shown through data in other places in the country lower recidivism rate so we're hopeful that we can help in that regard but only time will tell to the data thank you so much chief Berth