 Burlington, he grew up in Underhill, right, John? Basically, his mother and father were professors, retired professors at UVM, Spanish professors, and they brought him up here in Underhill, Vermont. But he also spent a lot of time in Puerto Rico because Joanne, his mother, it was born there and father and grew up there as well. He is a graduate of Harvard University, both undergraduate and also graduate degree from Harvard. He lived in California for a while. He came, then he moved to New York. He served in the New York Police Department. He also worked for Newsweek, which I find really interesting. I thought, you know, that would be at least as interesting I would think of being police chief. He, in November of 2016, he left New York City for the private sector. He worked with Bill Bratton's chief of staff. He came to Vermont in, I guess, about 2016, or when did you come to Vermont? 18, I moved, I took the job here as the deputy chief of operations in October of 2018. Okay, and that was when chief Del Poso was the chief of police, is that correct? That's correct. And when he came here to this, to back to Burlington, he took a big pay cut because he wanted to be in Vermont so badly and who could blame him after being in New York? Anyway, so he's with us tonight to talk a little bit about what it's like to be a police chief at this important moment. And then we will ask, have questions for him after that. And we would ask that those questions we put into chat. If somebody wants to ask me how to do that, maybe they could ask somebody else. But anyway, the question should come through the chat and then I will read those questions to the chief. Okay, so here we are, John. So what do you have to say? Where are your parents by the way? I thought they were parents. One, I see one, I see my mother. He's a friend of theirs who's staying with them. So I do see, I see one in the dark there. And I'm very, very gratified to see a number of dear friends from here. It's good to see you, Janet. And I'm just glad to see you. And I think that it is, I'm very, very happy to be here. Really glad that you've given me the opportunity to come by and speak. I actually don't have a lot to say myself. If I have one flaw, it's that I can go on. So I'm gonna try to keep it short and actually just allow some of these questions to come out. But I'll fill in a little bit to lay out where we are. And if the idea is to discuss where a police chief is right now in America, but also specifically in Burlington, I'll sort of keep myself to that. Everything that Sandy pointed out is true. I was born here in Vermont. I grew up here in Vermont. I was raised by two parents who were part of UVM. I left Vermont for college and didn't really come back aside from coming home and painting my parents' house so that they could have an excuse to give me enough money to go someplace else. And I went to California, spent several years there, moved to New York City to be with the woman who is now my wife, did work at Newsweek for a while. It was a good experience. It was during the 2004 elections and during the ramp up of the Iraq war. I wasn't a great journalist though and really didn't want that as a career. Was looking for something that I thought would have meaning. My younger brother is a neurosurgeon in Florida and he has a job where every moment is of consequence. And when he made a mistake or if he were to make a mistake, it has a great import. And I wanted a job like that and Newsweek to me didn't feel like that because I wasn't a good journalist. I think good journalists have a lot of impact and have a lot of ability to have lives of great import but I wanted something different. And I saw a, I read a book by a Harvard graduate who became a police officer. And that dispelled for me some misconceptions I had about whether or not I would be wasting my degree by taking on a job like that. I also was, I watched a mini series on HBO called Band of Brothers, which happened right around the time of 9-Eleven and 9-Eleven was a huge catalyst for me as well. And I wanted to know whether or not I had in me what I saw those people having in them through that experience. And last but not least, there was an article by Malcolm Gladwell in an issue, excuse me, of The New Yorker in which he talked about Myers-Briggs tests or MBTI tests, those binary question tests that you answer a 600, 700 questions yes or no, yes or no. And it's supposed to tell you who you are and break you up into personality types that dictate your reaction to the world. And that the purpose of his article was to say, no, that's not the case. To do that, you have to go live life. And I didn't feel I was living life. I left Los Angeles because it wasn't an examined life and it wasn't contributory. I tried to find that contribution in publishing and didn't. And then I did in policing. I joined the New York City Police Department. I was hired ridiculously quickly. I applied in October and was hired by January, which just never happens in that agency. They have year-long wait periods, multi-year wait periods. And I really enjoyed it. I ended up in working in housing projects in the Bronx, very intense work and very, very fulfilling. I was promoted to detective but then the sergeant and then finally I was an assistant commissioner there under Bill Bratton during his second tenure with the NYPD. And when he retired for the second time, he convinced me to go to the private sector with him. And I did and I wasn't fulfilled by it. And I wanted to be back in public service. And I also wanted to come home. I'd always been searching for a way to come home. My wife also loved Vermont. She's from Texas, but she lived here. My parents very graciously let us live with them for a year while I was in graduate school at Harvard. And so they'd moved in with my folks because it was an easier commute from Boston to Burlington than it was from Boston to New York. She knew the state. We both wanted to be here. When the opportunity came to apply for the job in Burlington, I leapt at it. And I did, I took a big pay cut to take that job but it was worth it. And I came aboard an agency that was, it was really, I think, moving in the right direction. I think Chief Del Poso was doing amazing things with this agency and Mayor Weinberger were doing amazing things with regard to the opioid epidemic, with regard to training issues. They overcame some real challenges and tragedies and built from those and developed a capacity for interacting with people who are in emotional distress that is, they were pilot for a national program that has shown great, great effect. They built some tools for that. A lot of it wasn't trickling into the officer corps, however. And so a good portion of what I was brought aboard to do was try to connect some of these achievements with the officers and to try to make certain that the officers felt supported and integrated into these changes that Chief Del Poso was making. And so that was what I preoccupied myself with for most of the time or rather occupied myself with for the first year or so of my tenure and made good inroads in that. And then I think anybody in Burlington knows what happened in December of 2019. And there was turmoil at the top of the agency. I led the agency for a month in December into early January, Chief Jennifer Morrison who had been with the Burlington Police Department for 20-something years and then had been in Colchester as the head of that agency for five years, agreed to come back to policing after having retired and led the Burlington Police Department for the first six months of 2020. But it was a really great partnership. I enjoyed so much working for her and learning from her. And then she left for a number of reasons. It was prearranged that she would leave in early June. And that coincided of course with a national tragedy. And the murder of George Floyd. The day that George Floyd was murdered, we were actually in Burlington facilitating and I personally planned with the Vermont National Guard and others the distribution, the largest food distribution that we'd ever done. And I believe have ever done in Burlington's history. I arranged to shut down the belt line and had the distribution there underneath the overpass from the North Avenue entrance. And we worked to do that. That was what I was spent May 25th doing. And then a horrible, horrible thing, a crime happened in Minneapolis. And that just changed everything. We went from dealing with the pandemic in a way again that was Jennifer Morrison and I were very clear about not wanting to do what became a problem for many other localities, which was turn police into an enforcement arm for that pandemic. And I think that we're lucky in Burlington that we didn't have to. We had a polity that was participatory in its own protection. And so that was a lot of peace. And so we were able to say that we are going to encourage and engage and educate but not enforce. That was a real positive. And much of that was dispelled by what happened in Minneapolis and then an understandable and impassioned movement here that did lead to a funding issue and a decision by the city council to require a 30% reduction in the Burlington Police Department through attrition. Thankfully, I initially believed that it was going to be through layoffs. I was very, very frightened of that opportunity. I dreaded the idea of laying off officers. I was in the chief's position by that point and laying off officers would have had really negative repercussions. Seniority rules by union rules, we would have had to lay off some of our most promising officers. But that didn't happen. It went to attrition instead. And that attrition has happened over the past year, I think faster than even I prognosticated. And I did warn that that's where we were going to be. And so now we find ourselves in a position where our headcount is drastically diminishing where our call volume is picking up again after a great depression in 2020. Overall incident volume in 2020 dropped about 17%. Our priority one calls, the most important calls, the calls that have the most impact on public safety went up 4% in 2020. So even as everything else plummeted, those rose. And now we are seeing and the first several months of 2021, we're also very depressed that's gone down but they're coming up again. And the complicated types of incidents are coming up a great deal. We had a few weekends ago two shooting incidents, two gunfire incidents. There's a difference between gunfire, which doesn't strike anyone and a shooting, which does. So these weren't shootings. We're fortunate that no one was struck, but they were gunfire in the city. They're the fourth and fifth gunfire incidents of 2021. Previous years had an average of two per year. But in 2020, we saw a dozen. And so we are seeing real changes in the city. They are driven by the pandemic. They are driven by things that are happening at the national scale. They are driven by a diminishment of police presence, I believe, I firmly believe and can find studies for you that say that police presence or police does equal reduced crime. And the thing about any of these stats is that people will have studies on both sides of the equation. They can talk about it from both sides. And most statistics can be argued from both sides too. In the Burlington Police Department, we do have racial disparities in our enforcement. We have racial disparities that's in traffic enforcement and in arrests and in use of force. And those are things that we have to confront. The presence of those gave credence to the passions that were evoked in last June's budget discussions. And so how we address those going forward, how we address the fact that we are losing officers left and right. And that's not merely in Burlington where we can't hire to replace by Fiat. It's everywhere where they can't hire to replace because no one will take the job. There is a massive recruitment and retention problem across the country. It's felt very keenly in the state. It's obviously felt keenly for us. That's a challenge for police chiefs in this modern era. Racial equity is a massive problem for police chiefs in this modern era. And one of the frustrations I think many police chiefs feel is that while we talk about systemic racism and acknowledge that it exists, there is this sense that the impacts of it, the outcomes of it, the effects of it when it comes to policing are the result of the police or of something that's happening in the police profession as opposed to the idea that it's everywhere and that there are many, many, many upstream factors that contribute to what we end up encountering at a police level. And so how we wrestle with all these really big problems are the challenge of 21st century policing and 21st century police chiefs. Can I ask, we have a couple of questions in the chat, but one thing that's puzzled me chief is that with the calls and I know that there are often exaggerated calls to defund the police and I'm not certain that that is the only thing that's going on with the people who are protesting is this defund idea. But if you lose police, my concern has always been about domestic violence. So I don't quite understand how if you're going to defund the police or even cause the police to be cut in any way, how are you gonna deal with the many calls for domestic violence? You certainly couldn't send a social worker into that kind of a situation. And that's, I really worry about that. There doesn't seem to be any consciousness that I know of among people who are saying to defund the police stating that one of the largest crimes that we face in this city and in the country is crimes against women in the home. And that only the police in that situation can arrest anybody or it can really solve that problem on an immediate level. I mean, how are you gonna do that? Yeah, so great question. And it's got so many parts to it. You're right that on the immediate level, oftentimes the police are the only response for that. I think the trick is to try to get upstream of it to the best that we can. I think another trick is to make certain that downstream we have adequate resources. And I think there are plenty of opportunities for other kinds of entities to be built or reinforced if they already exist in order to deal with those kinds of problems before they come to the point of being a police response. By the time you have neighbors calling because there is glass shattering and walls shaking and screens coming from the apartment next door, you've passed those points. You do have to have police. And we have to have at least two officers respond to that kind of scene. And that affects how we prioritize calls. But we saw an uptick, a great uptick in domestic incidents overall. It's domestic assaults that are misdemeanors, domestic assaults that are felonies and domestic disturbances. Huge uptick in those in 2020. Unsurprisingly, people were home and people were in close confines with one another. And those kinds of problems became something that came to the fore. What we do with that, we do need to make certain that we have the capacity to address them once they happen and are past the point of upstream intervention, past the point of social work. I think that defund has been used as a cudgel on both sides. It has been used as a cudgel by the people who want to augment other resources. And in some cases want out and out abolition. Abolition is absurd. It is absurd because it does not account for the darker parts of human nature. And it's not realistic, but it's not the bulk of the argument either. That is a fringe on one side. On the other side, you have, I think it was, it didn't do the center favors to have that topic and that word thrown around in the most recent election, for example, not Burlington's, but the national election. I think that the idea of defund has been used by one side of the aisle as fear mongering. And it has been used as another side of the aisle as an avenue towards abolition. And both of those are not going to get us anywhere. I do think there is room for enhancing and creating new resources in order to address upstream problems before they become police issues. I don't believe that means that we can afford to diminish police presence because the things that we still want the police to respond to, like an in progress domestic incident or a robbery or a homicide that requires a number of resources to be poured in in order to investigate and control a scene and hopefully apprehend a perpetrator, those still require the same number of officers. Officers in those respects are insurance policies for rare, but absolutely going to happen incidents. They are not going to stop happening no matter how much upstream work we do. They will still occur and we still need resources to handle them. And unfortunately, because they are labor intensive, resource intensive, we need a lot of resources to handle them. And it's not dissimilar to our understanding of our fire department. Our fire department has a third the call volume of the Burlington police department, a little less as a matter of fact. And it currently has more people. And we accept that because we know that when a fire does happen and they're very, very rare, structure fires are very rare. But when they happen, we want to make certain that somebody's there to put that fire out. And somebody is there to make certain that as few people are harmed by that as possible, that it doesn't spread. And we know that it requires a lot of resources to unit it. So we don't accept that with policing. And it's unfortunate and frustrating to me. And some of it has to do with, I think a communications effort on our part about really sharing what it is that police do when it counts. Okay. Chief, we do have some other questions. Okay. So one of them is from Don Shram and Barbara Nolfi. Hi to the two of you. That question is, what have you done, John, to educate yourself about racism? Wow, great, great question. I mean, I myself, I read a lot. I certainly have participated in all of the trainings that Burlington has done in the time that I've been here. I was integral in introducing a lot of that kind of training in the NYPD as well. It was very involved with Bill Bratton's bringing in bias trainers and embracing implicit bias did a terrific module with Phil Goff on implicit bias worked a lot on the concept of heuristics in graduate school and the ideas behind how we make fast and slow decisions whether that's Kahneman's book or whether that's other kinds of studies. But with regard to racial issues too, the history of that whether we're talking about something as long ago as Nicholas Lehman's The Promised Land and its discussions of the Great Migration and the diaspora or whether we are talking about more focused studies about the great figures of the civil rights movement or more modern works like Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow, like those kinds of discussions about how we are still burdened by this original sin that came to the continent as soon as people came to the continent. And I think that again, a lot of work on that during my time with the NYPD and here we've brought a board in the Burlington Police Department we've been doing an iterative process with a racial bias, implicit bias and anti-racism trainer named Trustee Loving and Ms. Loving what we did with her rather than doing a one-off where we have one day and everybody comes in and sort of checks that box we have done this iterative process of six different lesson modules with her it's her own proprietary material. It has been remote because of the pandemic but what's really great about it is that she's done each of those multiple times in order to allow our officers to do the training as the same officer groups with whom they work. So the midnight's go together and the day shift right side goes together and our detectives go together and it engenders different kinds of conversations that she then facilitates and leads as they talk about these things. And that has been tremendously productive. We're nearing the end of it but I'm hopeful to be able to continue to work with her and do some projects. And there's a question from others that somehow I'm wondering what it means it says privately, does that person want me to read the question to the chief or not? Does that, I don't know what? Yeah, Eric, yeah. I'm going to read the question because I would imagine, I guess that is addressed to you chief Murad and that is how do you imagine that Burlington can achieve some form of racial equity inside the police force for issues such as homelessness and mental illness. What is your view of social workers being embedded in police force units? So I would love to have social workers embedded. We do have one social worker who works with us. Her name is Lacey Smith. I would clone her if I had that technology. I think she's amazing. I am incredibly appreciative of the work that she does. She interacts a lot with houseless individuals in Burlington. She worked very closely with the individuals who were brought into our hotels over the past year. We have had a very interesting year in 2020 with regard to issues around homelessness and attendant downtown disorder because many of those individuals have not been downtown. It's been a combination. Downtown itself is quieter but many of those individuals have been given housing and the idea of giving them housing is not the end all be all. It's not the only solution. Many of the individuals who are are relatively service resistant and who are people who we see out on the street more often are homeless or houseless sometimes for reasons and sometimes they actually have residences to which to go but they have a number of other co-occurring challenges whether those are substance use disorder issues whether those are mental health issues. And so the mere existence of a roof isn't the end all be all but it is a huge step forward. And we saw that this year with regard to decreased kinds of issues around that sort of disorder. We're gonna see it in rise because most of those individuals are losing that housing this summer. And so Lacey has been going to the hotels and interacting with them and delivering services to them where they are she will continue to do that once they are relocated whether that is to facilities like Cox or the new facility on Shelburne Road or whether that is unfortunately encampments like the one that we have on Sears Lane or other locations. Lacey goes to them and meets them where they are. Officers will too. I presented in January a plan called the public safety continuity plan to the city council. I developed it pretty much right after the defunding because I knew where we were going to be with regard to headcount issues. And the writing on the wall from the community was a component of this is a, if I discount the abolition aspect of it a component is we don't want as many armed officers showing up for incidents because an armed officer can always escalate to something greater. All right. So we developed a plan wherein we would increase the number of community service officers that we have or CSOs and those CSOs are unarmed. They're not sworn. They do not have law enforcement powers but the two that we have currently functioned primarily as animal control officers but they do some other kinds of work. And by onboarding more and the city council authorized me to hire 10 more I will be able to divest certain kinds of calls for service from the police to these officers. At the same time, the public safety continuity plan called for the unloading of six community support liaisons or CSLs and I know the acronyms can get confusing but the CSLs are not CSOs. They are social workers trained to deal with issues of houselessness of mental health of substance use disorder. The city council did not approve that part. I don't believe they want those aspects living in the Burlington police department. They approved one of the six and I am gonna onboard that individual to focus primarily on substance use disorder. The opioid epidemic got away from us in 2020 in an awful way but I want more. I want those individuals to co-deploy with police officers, not to deploy alone or to get to a situation where they then call police. I think that they work well in tandem because they share information in ways that is very difficult to do if they are based elsewhere. That's my opinion, it's not the way it's going to work out. I think instead, the city is going to be exploring working on a model similar to something in Eugene, Oregon called Kahootz and I think they're gonna do that with a bidder, whether that turns out to be, obviously Howard center would be sort of a logical kind of entity to do that. Maybe there are other entities that can think about it but that kind of expansion of existing mental health capacities such as street outreach and first call and then something else that models that Kahootz that follows that Kahootz model. Okay, there's another question. This person is saying, can you tell us about CSOs where are we with recruiting these unarmed officers and what will be their role? Are you getting a diverse pool of applicants? So these are unarmed officers, can you address that? That is correct. So the CSOs are not armed. They can't carry a firearm and they carry a pepper spray. They will wear a body armor but they are unsworn officers. They are able to do a number of different kinds of calls for service. They currently, as I said, do primarily animal control issues. They take fingerprints. They do certain kinds of VIN checks. They do some traffic control. We would expand that role to do presence patrol like on foot, on church street or on North street. We would expand that role to perhaps be able to address certain kinds of municipal ticket issues. A municipal ticket isn't a crime. It's something that's written into a charter and it's unlawful or it's an ordinance but it's not a crime and therefore you can enforce it even if you're not a law enforcement officer. You can write a ticket for noise. You can write a ticket for open container but we're gonna have to see whether that's possible. There are going to be noise complaints or it is not appropriate to send somebody who's not armed and is not a law enforcement officer. The CSOs take about seven and a half months to train and to identify vet, hire and train. We are in the very earliest stages of that. I do have some candidates. We just devised a test for them and we're gonna be administering that test to the first couple of candidates very soon. Could we maybe have some identified people in a conditional offer before the end of this fiscal year? Maybe, probably not. We're probably gonna have that in the very, very, very beginning of the fiscal year and then we'll be able to do our extensive background process on them and then get them into a training situation but solo deployment probably won't happen until well after the summer. So we're not gonna be able to take advantage of them in the short term with regard to minimizing our use of what I called the priority response plan and the need at times not to respond immediately to priority three calls. That is gonna be something that we're gonna have to address over the summer but bringing them aboard as we do is I'm hopeful that we will minimize the need to use that priority response plan going forward. There is a question about a recent incident when the questioner says that a child called the Burlington police because his father was beating his pregnant girlfriend. The police responded. The father was hiding in the basement. He did not resist but the outcome was that the woman was uncooperative and that there were no charges. I'm concerned that because the team didn't respond. The child who had fled to a friend's house did not get the help of a social worker and the woman may have responded differently with someone trained to work with abused women in a domestic call. I've seen eight officers on a call. Why can't there be at least two mentally mental health trained social workers? Can I just make a comment as a lawyer? Cause I've dealt with a lot of these situations over the years. There are many times when a woman will not press charges. That's very unfortunate in my mind but it happens a lot. Women choose to stay in situations that are very bad for themselves and bad for their children too often, too often. For many reasons financial reasons, psychological reasons. And we would all hope that that doesn't happen but unfortunately it does. But maybe you can address why? The question is I think that why can't there be at least two mental health trained social workers? I think, is that what you meant? Questioner? I'd love that. That is the nature of the CSL component, the community support liaison component of the public safety continuity plan but it's the part that wasn't ultimately accepted. So that part wasn't ultimately accepted. When those resources are built out in other locations then asking them to come to a scene is quite possible. We do have a domestic violence prevention officer in the Burlington Police Department, invaluable role, able to dig into cases in a way that responding officers can't but isn't on 24 hours a day, there's only one. So does that officer go to an incident like this? No, not necessarily. At an incident like this one, we end up with a situation where we alert DCF, Department of Children and Families, and if we have a case like that, but absent injury without a complainant and without a clear sort of case in front of us, the threshold for taking custody of somebody in a situation absent a complainant is remarkably high. Okay, there is a follow up question to the one that was just asked before and that is, isn't the law today that regardless of whether a woman presses charges, police can act if they see harm? Why don't you address that? I can't, go ahead. I kind of, I think I did. I said that there have absent injury and absent a cooperative complainant, there is a very high threshold for trying to take somebody into custody. I agree. I think that what we're talking about instead is reporting appropriately. And I'll tell you that the vast majority of even when we make domestic violence arrests, those individuals are not held. They're released from the station house with citation. Vermont judges release everybody with a citation to appear in court at a later point. We hold, I think it is less than a third and I think it's actually less than 20% of the people to whom we, there's a difference between arrest and sight but they're both very similar in the public's mind. There are tickets that we give for traffic infractions or for having an open container of alcohol. There are citations that are given for most misdemeanors. In the state of Vermont, the vast majority of misdemeanors are issued what's called a citation to appear in court and officers cannot arrest for an unwitnessed misdemeanor. And that's not witnessed by a person that's witnessed by the officer. So the mere idea that a person says, this crime happened to me and that person did it is not sufficient for an officer to say, well, now that person is under arrest. In many other states it is. But here in Vermont, the officer has to have witnessed it and if he doesn't or she doesn't, then that officer is going to issue a citation to appear in court at a later date. Sometimes months later, sometimes months later. Sometimes months later. Right now it is many months later because the cart is backlogged. Hey, don't get me going on that about the law. I'm sure that's something. Right. But then there are a handful of misdemeanors that are called unwitnessed misdemeanors or where an officer doesn't have to witness it. Those generally are the misdemeanors that deal with violence. Domestic violence would be among those. There are then of course felonies that you don't have to witness that. If you've got the charges of a felony, you can take the person into custody irrespective of whether or not you witnessed it. So I get to a scene and a person has a knife inside him and he's pointing to the other person. That person is going to be arrested and brought back to the station. But I'll tell you this, even in that instance, if that individual doesn't have a significant record, doesn't have a significant history of not showing at court and has a residence in the city and that individual is still very likely to be released directly from the station house with conditions issued by the judge. Don't go near that person again, stop stabbing people but not held in jail and not held overnight. Not held after. And that's Vermont's sort of, that's Vermont's mode. And let's be honest, most of the time that is the right thing because we don't need to have people in custody. But there are times where we do and the pendulum has gone too far in that direction of non-custodial intervention. There's another question, Chief. What are your thoughts about the mayor of Ithaca's proposal to replace the city's police department with the Department of Community Solutions and Public Safety? I'm not in favor of that proposal in Ithaca. And it seemed to me that he, I don't know how much work he did on it because I think his police chief left when he announced it for lack of any preparation. The police chief left his job, you mean? I believe so. Wow. Okay, any follow up with that? Nope. All right. And then as a follow up also to the question about the uncooperative witness, basically, another question this person meant, a social mental health worker, why is that person a part of every team that goes out on a domestic? I think, did you answer that already? I think I did. Yes, but is that because of lack of funds? It's because the social workers aren't allowed to be part of the Burlington Police Department. There's another whole, I just want to comment a little bit on that. Domestic violence situations are the situations where the police get most murdered in those situations and most hurt in those situations. So a social worker, probably you wouldn't want to put a social worker in that kind of a dangerous situation. A domestic violence scene is very dangerous. I think anyway, I don't know what you think, Chey, but. It can be very dangerous. It's certainly up there for risk to officers. You can get to a situation where you can get to a situation where the person you're there to assist and help is actually, it turns into somebody who opposes the assistance. It's a complicated dynamic that it can be dangerous, yes. Yeah, there are other questions. Again, the proposal, I imagine that's the Ithaca proposal. The proposal doesn't abolish or defund the police, but rather redefine roles. I'm not certain what that means. In other words, the Ithaca program does not really abolish the police or defund them, but rather changes their roles. What changes would that mean even? Does anybody? It doesn't use those words, which I think really hurt the argument, but it does propose a different way of thinking about public safety. I like that. So, John, are there aspects of it that you think have value? I mean, have you looked at it? I assume you have. I have looked at it, not in depth. And I think that aspects of the Public Safety Continuity Plan are those are aspects that I'm in favor of. I think one of the main reasons is just trying to appropriately, and I think that's what we all wanna do is appropriately assign the people with the right training and the right weapons or not weapons to address a call, right? Right? Yes, I agree with that. I think that there is a, I don't know that there's a real understanding of the kinds of resources you still need for the calls that you're always going to want police to go to. So a lot of this comes down to funding. A lot of this comes down to a willingness to say, we have a service right now that because it is open 24 hours a day and 365 days a year, because it has the shortest telephone number in the country, we call 911 and they come and they come for everything. They come for everything because there are times a day where you'd say this isn't a police call and I'd rather call DPW, but they're not on. And so we have a, there's a dead animal in the middle of the road and it's causing a traffic hazard. That's a sanitation issue or DPW issue, but they're not 24 hours. And so the police come and deal with that. And we have a noise complaint next door and that might be a code enforcement issue or it might be something else, but the police are around and they're gonna come to that. They get to everything first and they're always available. And we've put a lot on their plate, but we could develop parallel resources that are also 365 days a year, 24 hours a day. I think it would be remarkably expensive. We could develop those resources to the point where we are able to say these are, this is a specialized thing that only goes to this and this and this. And here's a specialized thing that goes to only this and this and this. We could build the equivalent of the 35 item place setting that a particularly elegant house in the late 19th century might have had, but we don't use that anymore. The police are correll. They're microwavable and they don't break and you could throw them in the dishwasher and they come out and do what they're supposed to do, but they're not a 35 piece China setting. So building that takes refund, it takes, excuse me, it takes resources and funding. And in the end you have a shrimp fork that you only use when there's shrimp. And the rest of the time you're paying its salary and its benefits to be around just in case you have shrimp. So that is a possibility. I think that we definitely want to do that with the things that are much more important and are much more common. And mental health is definitely something that is like that. We have a lot of mental health issues that we want. I said before that the social workers, the city council did not approve the CSL positions to reside in the Brolin Complaints Department. That is what I meant by saying that those are not going to be able to co-deploy for an incident like this. They're gonna reside in other places. Could they come after the fact, after a scene has been stabilized in order to liaise with and meet with, for example, a complainant who suddenly unwilling to be a cooperative complainant? Absolutely. Irrespective of whether they reside in the police department and co-deploy in the same cruiser or whether they're coming from some other agency, that absolutely can happen. But what I meant by saying that they can't be co-deployed because it was determined that that's not where they're going to reside in the police department. We do have some rather long question which I will attempt to read. Anyway, this question is, I have a New York question for John to understand John's approach to policing and race. Having grown up in New York City in the 70s, I experienced a New York City police force that was extremely racial. Highland was burning, but the police really didn't serve the whole city. This only seemed to turn after the election of Mayor David Dinkins who introduced a much greater diversity in the police as well as a concept of community policing. His work was obscured by Mayor Giuliani, America's mayor, who turned it into a break a window policy. But I'm wondering what you can tell us from a professional perspective of the Dinkins reforms of the New York City police. Was it an advance from your point of view? How do you imagine Burlington can achieve some form of racial equity inside the police force? Equity is really a very used word right now. So I think this is really an interesting question, okay? How would you imagine then Burlington can achieve some form of racial equity inside the police force, John? So I think that, do we mean hiring? Is that what racial equity inside the police department means? Is it an appreciation for the presence of bias? Is it an understanding of how historic and systemic racism function? What is that equity and what is that goal? In New York, New York in 1990 saw 2,245 murders. It was the single bloodiest year in the city's history. 2,245 murders in a single year and up until about two years ago, a year and a half ago it was seeing in the high 200s and low 300s. So it had dropped by 2,000 almost, murders a year. That decline began with David Dinkins' mayorality the very last years of his mayorality but it only really took hold during the beginning of Bill Bratton's position as the police commissioner there. And it was driven, however, by one major factor and that factor was a huge hiring rush that had occurred in the last years of the Bush administration across the country that then President Clinton took great advantage of and perpetuated and brought massive numbers of new officers to the profession across the country. The decreases that were seen in New York both set the standard for and drastically drove the crime reduction across the rest of the country. It was not just a part of the movement, it was the movement for the first two years or three years. New York fell from 1990, it was a short, it was a small decline in 1991 and 1992 after that honest horribilice of 1990 but then it absolutely plummeted in 94 and 95 and 96 and then it tapered out a little bit and continued to decline until two years ago and it has since, it has gone drastically up. Now we're near the total numbers that we saw in those terrible years of the late 80s and the 90s but percentage-wise it has doubled over the past two years and that's for shootings and for murders. Something's changing in the city and it's in the wrong direction and we're seeing that across the country but how did they achieve some of that racial balance? That was achieved by hiring more and by having hiring standards and looking around the commissioner at the very end of Mayor Dinkins' mayorality was Ray Kelly but the commissioner immediately before him was a man named Lee Brown who later became the mayor of Houston and Lee Brown had a terrific line about the fact that policing preach his service but it hires adventurers and how do you kind of push back against that? And I think that he was able to find the beginnings of an answer for that. He left, commissioner Kelly did some work on it and then commissioner Bratton really brought in really leveraged those funds to bring aboard the largest classes in the department's history and be able to take that huge number of officers and say you need to go out and you need to address disorder. You need to listen to what the people in the communities are saying they wanna dress and what they were saying they wanted to dress was not merely the muggings or the violent crime that seemed at times ubiquitous because even when those crimes are at their highest they are a tiny fraction of the overall proportion of crime. Crime is driven numerically by larcenies and car breakings. And now those are everybody experiences those. And there were signs of surrender as it were in car windows where people would leave pieces of paper on their car window that says no radio because they just wanted to dissuade anybody from trying to break in and steal their radios. That was New York in the late 80s and early 90s. And so how you build on that you say, well, those kinds of crimes, those disorder crimes are the things that the public is clamoring about. And I'm gonna have these new resources and these officers go and address those. And we are able by doing that to also address the big stuff. It's an equivalent of getting upstream from the big stuff so that we're not just waiting for the big thing to happen and going into addressing that as well as we can. Now, if we can get even further upstream all the better so that we can start addressing the problems that really lead to that, but that's one method. I'm concerned right now with regard to the priority response plan that we've put together. I don't like not being able to respond to priority three calls because I think those priority three calls for service are the problem to reducing- But John, what are priority three calls? Okay, so the priority response plan, we announced it, I guess two weeks ago now, we put it into place in May knowing that we were gonna have to start using it. Our priority one calls are high priority. They are things like aggravated assaults and missing person calls and sexual assaults and robberies and homicides. They're not common. They constitute about 7.7% of the total incident volume in 2020. Our priority two calls are kind of in between. Many of them have a safety component. They are things like a burglary, although a burglary in progress would be a priority one. They are things like disturbances or disorderly conduct, although a disorderly conduct that appears to be about to become a fight or an assault would be a priority one. A disorderly conduct in the past or even a burglary in the past might be a priority three. And our priority three calls are the ones that we can afford not to respond to immediately if we are short on resources and overwhelmed by incident volume in a given moment. So the priority twos constitute about 43% of the total call volume. Remember priority one was about 7, plus percent, 8% and about half of the remaining calls are priority three. When we have fewer than two officers available to respond to something, we will not go to priority three calls. We have to maintain at least two officers available in order to go to a domestic violence that occurs in order to go to a robbery that occurs. And as a result, those priority three calls, noise complaints, vandalisms, certain kinds of crimes in the past, they will not get an immediate response. Okay, sorry, fast, go ahead. There's a few questions that we either haven't gotten to or skipped over. So I was wondering if you could- I don't see them then. I'm here, here's the next question that I'm seeing, okay? And that is, can you talk about your own decision, John? Am I correct, Beth? Okay. Can you talk about your own decision to apply to be the next police chief, that's the permanent chief, in light of your concerns about the direction of the racial justice resolution? To the person who asked that question, does everybody know what the racial justice resolution is? Okay, but John, maybe you can address that. Sure, it was a resolution put together by the city council last June that included a number of different parts. And with the exception of the part that required that the Burlington Police Department a trit by 30% before it could again hire and go from its then authorized number of 105 and we had about 92 officers to 74 officers. Aside from that one component of the resolution, I actually believe that it was a terrific resolution, had a lot in it, had requirements for training about racial equity and racial justice. It had requirements for what we did with regard to working out new levels of cooperation with the citizen police commission, which is an independent body and giving them codified ways to interact with the police department with regard to civilian complaints. And there were a number of parts, but the most salient part to this conversation is by far not the most important part of it, but the salient part to this conversation is that it required the police department to a trit by 30% before it could again hire. And that means we went, we have to go from our historical average of about 96 officers at any given time to 74. We're currently as of April 1st, we were at 82 on my books, but that is only 77 effective. I have a number of officers who are on long-term military deployments. I have some officers who are on long-term injury and those are not effective officers. I can't deploy them. So I'm down to 77, I'm down from 90, even when I had 96, they weren't all effective, but I had 94, 93 officers who I could deploy. So go down to 77, which I have now and it is dropping, means that I can't have specialized roles. The only specialized role that I have maintained is the domestic violence prevention officer because of its importance, but I don't have a community affairs officer anymore. I don't have an emergency response officer. I don't have SROs in the schools. That was another component of the racial justice resolution to remove SROs from the schools. I don't have enough officers to create what we used to have a swing shift which overlaps between our day shift and our evening shift. I don't have enough officers to create what we used to have, which was called the street crime team, which was something that could dig into cases a little bit more complicated than the road can deal with, patrol can deal with, but not as complicated that they would need the detective services bureau. And the absence of those resources and then the ability to at times deploy them for big incidents or for large scale events like July 3rd is a blow. So we have, for example, a look right now. I mean, right now we normally have about 68 officers assigned to the July 3rd event. I think we're going to have closer to 30 this year. So that was my question. So that was my question. And the real, just to the question, John, is, so given all of that, why are you applying for the job? Well, I'm looking forward to seeing what the mayor's listening to a result in. He's doing a lot of work right now to listen to the community. He's going to different audiences and understanding what it is they're looking for and he's going to write a job description based on that. Okay, well, there is another question from Sharon Bushar. She says, as I understand the city council's position on mental health and social workers is that they support the city council, support the expansion, but want them separate from the police department. That's correct. So they agreed to the public safety continuity plans request for six CSLs, but five of those are going to reside elsewhere and they haven't yet determined where those reside. And I don't believe they're anywhere near beginning the hiring process for them. So would you be hiring them or who? No, no, it would be determined by whomever. Let's say some of them go to work at the CJC or reside there. Maybe someone resided at the fire department. Maybe someone would resire at other parts of CEDO, for other than CJC, those entities would have to identify them and vet them and train them and hire them. Okay. There are two comments. Should I read the comments or do those people want to make those comments themselves? They don't appear to be questions. No, there's comments. Okay. Okay, so people see those comments or what? Yeah, okay. All right, are there other questions for the chief? That's exactly. Okay, I would just ask one other question. And that is what is happening to crime rates in our city? Crime rates, the ones that we track are, so certain categories are going up and certain categories are going down. Let me see if I can actually find that. The numbers would be, unfortunately, on this computer, I have to shrink the screen and try to see if I can find it to give you some specific categories and information in those specific categories. If you'll, I apologize, just bear with me for a moment. But the directions are kind of, are complicated. It's not, however, about crime. As I said, shooting incidents or gunfire incidents are up and they're up significantly. We are seeing increases in overdoses. We're seeing increases in, as I mentioned before, domestic disturbance. I'm sorry, let me, here we go. So aggregated domestic incidents went up drastically from 2019 to 2020, from 604 to 643. Robberies spiked in 2019, went up in 2019, went down overall in 2020, that's partly just as a result of not having as many people around in the city to be robbed. Sex assaults went from 46 to 60. Significant increase in sex assaults in 2020. Felony assaults went from 50 to 51. That's up, but that's a pretty small up. Gunfire homicides and attempted homicides doubled from two to four. These are very small numbers. And that's one of the challenges with Burlington and looking at anything are these very small numbers and what equals a trend or not. Mental health incidents went up a lot in 2020. I think that's probably unsurprising. There are two ways that the Burlington Police Department tracks mental health incidents. There's a mental health issue, which is an entire incident. So that's how it's categorized. And then there's a mental health check box, which any incident can have that box checked if mental health was a component in the officer's estimation in that incident. From 2019 to 2020, mental health issue went from 764 to 946. And mental health check box went from 1260 to 1754. And then overdoses increased by 72% from 58 to 100. And that's not fatal overdoses. That's all overdoses. I don't have the figure for fatal overdoses I'm afraid. But we're seeing these kinds of categories and they're troubling categories. And I think that it is of concern to me isn't just the actual numbers of those crimes. Burlington's numbers are small enough that we don't use the same kinds of unified crime reporting numbers that other cities do. So the UCR is the FBI's way of tracking crime. And those are the seven major crimes. They are auto larceny, the law doesn't have a larceny statute. It is auto larceny and then it is larceny. It is a grand larceny, felony larceny. It is burglary. It is felony assault and then rape and then homicide. I think that's seven, although I wasn't counting on my finger so I'm not sure how many I just said. But those are in essence the seven majors. We have so few of most of those categories that it's not something that we track in that way. But I can find the data for you of course and I'm happy to provide it. Burlington has a terrific open data portal that's on the Burlington city website. You can access it through the Burlington Police Department site or other parts of the city site that lead to open data across a range of different categories in Burlington. And all of that crime data is one of those categories. You can track every single kind of incident, the 130 incidents that we track through our Valcor system, the computer system that dispatch slots every call for service or every incident gets into one of those 130 categories. You can track them across the last 11 years, not 11, nine years and in incremental amounts and month by month. It's a really, really robust and interactive data port to find all that stuff. John, we have one final question. We're running out of time. First of all, I wanna thank you very much for being here. I would like to ask this question because it comes from a city council member over in South Burlington and this is from Megan Emory. She says she's a city council member in the South Burlington. So she does, would like to ask the following questions. She says she's on two devices, apologizes for the poor video. How does the reduced force in Burlington affect mutual assistance calls? Yeah. And shared dispatch. She says I'm a South Burlington city councilor and so I'm asking as a municipal leader and as an constituent resident. I don't really know what all that means, but I hope you do. So I'll try to lay out the sort of the most shared dispatch. It doesn't affect at all council or the councilor. That's a separate issue and it hasn't progressed. We're not in it yet. Burlington's not in it. Our dispatch is independent and our dispatch is a unit inside the police department that dispatches both for fire incidents in Burlington and police incidents in Burlington. With regard to mutual aid, mutual aid is mutual aid as long as it can remain mutual. And I think that my neighboring communities have concerns about whether or not we are going to be able to answer when they need us. And so those other municipalities have actually, we've established a new letter with those other entities that is Colchester PD, UVMPD, Lewinowski PD and South Burlington PD that ensures that they will not respond to a incident in Burlington unless there is a Burlington officer on that incident as primary. So the night of the gunfire incident that I mentioned, it was during one of those huge parties that happened on Isham Street. Really massive parties. Why? Yeah, officers went to that party. They could not break the party up. They took bottles and cans from students and party goers. They retreated. An hour later, there was a gunfire incident. That meant every officer on duty went to the location to try to figure out what has happened here. Multiple calls. Fortunately, nobody struck, but they did recover evidence. They know that a gunfire incident occurred. It wasn't just somebody doing fireworks. We know that a person fired a gun or in the midst of that crowd. And that was every officer. At the same time, a domestic violence incident occurred. And we requested assistance from UVM and SPPD. They went to that call. They won't do that in the future. I would have to break off or my supervisor on scene would have to break one of the officers off the shooting call. Send that officer to the domestic violence to be the primary. He or she would be joined by somebody from South Burlington or UVM. And maybe I would also request somebody from South Burlington or UVM to come in and fill that officer's spot at the crime scene if I really need all six. And we did that night. And so that is a complicated kind of interaction. But our neighboring communities don't want to, they have resource issues of their own and they have needs of their own. Well, anybody else have any final comments? I would like to thank the chief for coming tonight and for talking to us. And maybe he will again, because it's an ongoing concern of all of our citizens in Burlington. And I really want to thank him for being here with us tonight. And anyway, good night. Next week we'll be discussing, I believe an international issue of Haiti. And so I hope you all join us again then. But, and I'm very, I'd be interested in joining that. At the NYPD, after the Haitian earthquake, we put together a team of NYPD officers to embed with the Haitian National Police. I actually created the program. We took officers who were Haitian, spoke Haitian Creole, and we embedded them with the Haitian National Police in order to exchange best practices and try to get them back on their feet after that terrible, terrible earthquake. I think that- Well, then I will, Beth, Beth make sure you include him on the invite. The speaker next week will be Tim Reiser, who was from Senator Leahy's office. And he's been doing a lot of negotiations about Haiti. And so we're gonna welcome him next week. But thank you all for coming tonight. And thank you particularly, John, and good luck with this new hiring process, okay? Thank you. See you later. Thank you for all being here. Thank you. Thank you. Bye. Bye.