 Good afternoon and thank you all for being here today. We are here to announce a new priority response plan that has been implemented by the Burlington Police Department. The reasons for the implementation of this plan are simple. It is staffing and our diminishing headcount and our recent incident volume. So this is a measure that we created over the past few months and put into effect officially on May 2nd, but did not need to use with any real degree of frequency until recently, the 19th. We had a few days and then a weekend that were extremely busy and required us to put this into effect. We had very, very large parties. We had incidents with robbery, gunfire, vandalism, a long series of vandalisms, and it's not simply the volume of those incidents. It is also the complexity of those incidents and the way in which they absorb police resources quickly. So the rationale for this plan and for sharing it with the public is simply that we have had to put it into effect. If you would please slide one. These are the incidents that are tracked by the Burlington Police Department in our Val Corps system, about 130. And of those 130, we have subcategorized them into three priorities, priority one, priority two, and priority three. Priority one incidents comprise about 7.7% of the total volume as of February, excuse me, as of 2020. So looking at 2020's whole year data, priority one incidents are about 7.7%. They are the most serious incidents to which we respond. They are incidents of assaults and DUI and gunfire and overdoses, robberies, crashes with injury or fatal crashes. Priority two incidents comprise about 42.6% of the total incident volume in 2020. They include things like disorderly conduct, mental health calls and issues, welfare checks, trespass. And finally, there is priority three, which comprises about 49.6% of all incidents in 2020. So half of all incidents are priority three. And those include many quality of life issues, such as noise complaints or vandalism. They include motor vehicle complaints. They include late reported events. So in dividing the calls into these categories, our understanding was that we knew that as staffing decreased and as incident volume picked up, there would be times where we simply would not have the resources to respond. And we want to be certain that we are always responding to incidents that involve our neighbors physical safety. That is our priority. The mission of the police, the reason police exist is to keep people safe by preventing and responding to crime and disorder with and for our neighbors. But the disorder part may have to take a back seat when staffing is low, when incident volume is high, and when we are dealing with priority one and priority two incidents. So the priority response plan is only put into effect when staffing resources are absorbed by priority one and priority two incidents. So when incident volume and or the staffing deficits leave the BPD with two or fewer available officers, priority three incidents will not receive a response until more than two officers are once again available. The trigger is two officers available. And the rationale for that is that the majority of our priority one and many of our priority two incidents require a two officer response. Having two officers on scene is safer for everyone involved. For the officers, for witnesses, for bystanders, for subjects, and certainly for victims. And in order to maintain the ability to respond with two officers to the important events, the priority one incidents that occur, we will have to hold priority three incidents as stacked, which is a term for our dispatch. So when a call comes into 911 and they get transferred to our dispatchers, our dispatchers are going to determine what kind of priority that is, determine the available resources, and if necessary, they are going to stack priority three incidents. So calls for certain kinds of activity, which are shown here may not get a response. As we build out our CSO or our community service officer, non sworn, unarmed officers, as we build out that capacity, CSOs maybe may be able to respond to some of these priority three incidents when the priority response plan is put into effect and thereby minimize the incidents that we have to stack or hold. That is our object. We do not want ever to leave people hanging on the other end of the line without being able to respond to their needs. But the fact of the matter is that in order to make certain that we are doing that response effectively and safely for our priority one and two incidents, priority threes may have to be held. The next slide, please. This shows priority incidents by occurrence. So these are the totality of the 130 call categories to which we respond, the incident categories, excuse me, to which we respond. And they're stacked here, both they're shown by color code as to which priority they are, but they're also the number that occurred in 2020 is included. So you can get an idea of how those individual kinds of incidents occur. Can they give me the next slide, please. This table shows our staffing chart. This is our downtown staffing chart. These are the officers that we have available on any given day on any given shift. And we have both sides of our schedule. Our schedule overlaps one day. We have two teams for our day shift that overlap one day a week. We have two teams for our evening shift that overlap one day a week and two teams for our midnight shift that overlap one day a week. This shows you where we are. These are remarkably low numbers for us. In 1979, there was a reorganization of this police department. It showed 71 sworn officers operating full-time. And at that time, the population in the city was in the high 30,000. So we are at a place right now where we are approaching those kinds of numbers. What this shows is that we have these shifts with seven on each side of our schedule. Normally, that is eight to nine. And normally, in addition to this, we would have a swing shift that would cover an overlap between the day shift and the evening shift. We would have a street crime team that covers the kinds of incidents that are not quite at the level of the detective services bureau but are more than the road can handle with regard to also being able to service incoming calls for service. And so those are both gone as are almost all of our specialized positions with the exception of our domestic violence prevention officer. Can you go to the next slide, please? So this gives a picture of what we're talking about for the city. Seven officers on a side is not seven. We have something called the availability factor, which is a contractual calculation based on the fact that officers, like anyone else, get leave. They get vacation, et cetera. It doesn't include training time. It doesn't include timeout for injuries or sick leave. It is only contractual leave. And that creates an availability factor of 86.3%. In other words, an officer is not around 100% of the time. He or she is around 86.3% of the time. And therefore, any given shift with seven people, it's actually six people based on the availability factor. We've got six people for the days, six people for the eaves. And we have three officers on the mids with availability factor. Again, if you look at the previous slide, there were seven on each shift and four on the midnights. But this is what we have on a typical shift. That's for all 44,000 residents of Burlington. That is for the many thousands more who come into Burlington for a variety of reasons and who are going to be coming in even more as our community opens up again, as we get closer and closer to what I hope is the governor announcing that we've reached that 80% vaccination rate and are able to actually step away from the COVID precautions that have thus far existed. And that is also for all 15 square miles of our great city. So the notion of that number is, I think, important for folks in the community to take a look at and to get a sense of where we are with regard to staff. Can you move to the next slide? There is, however, I believe, a light at the end of the tunnel. This is something that we have created inside the department in conjunction with the mayor's office as well. It is the public safety continuity plan. We presented this to the city council in January. They agreed to it a month later, and we are in the process of implementing it. It includes, as I stated a little bit earlier, our community service officers, or CSOs. CSOs are not sworn police officers. They do not have law enforcement powers. They are not armed, but they are capable of functioning in a variety of roles, many of which we are hopeful will be able to ameliorate the kinds of staffing deficits that we are seeing with regard to where we currently stand as far as effective headcount. And that effective headcount, by the way, I should have stated earlier, as of April 1st, we were at 82 sworn officers on our books, but that is about 77 effective. That is because of military deployments, because of long-term injuries. And all along what we have said is that the 77-76 area is the trigger for us reevaluating how we deploy. So, I think that's it. You can go to the end. And I'll take questions. My first question is, in your opinion, does this plan impact the safety of brown ponies at all? Does the plan impact the safety? No, I don't believe this plan impacts safety. I do think that our where we are with regard to staffing has impact on that. But with regard to this plan, no. How have you seen other police departments have to employ a priority plan like this? Yes, a number of different police officers across the country are experiencing similar issues with regard to staffing. I think one of the most prominent would be, oh gosh, Chris Magnus was the chief there. And I can't remember the city, but you can find that. And he has been dealing a lot with announcing it. What city? It's Arizona. Tucson, thank you. Thanks. Tucson. And Chris actually isn't the chief there anymore, because he just, I think, went to customs and border control. But Tucson has dealt with this, with a shrinking head count for quite a few years. And they recently have announced a plan not dissimilar to this one, one where they really are having to make priorities about what they do and do not respond to in the moment. I want to be clear that once an incident is stacked, we will respond to it once our officers are again free. Now, sometimes those incidents are gone. A noise complaint may very well not be a noise complaint by the time an officer can get to it. And I do want the people of our city to recognize that that may happen. That's why we're doing this, to say that certain kinds of calls may not get immediate response. And we owe it to our neighbors to explain that and let them know. And you said the first time that this plan was used was May 19th? Not the first time. I believe it might have been implemented once or twice in the, from May 2nd until, but we used it a lot starting on May 19th, because of the incident volume. How many times would you say you have to do that? I don't know the answer to that right now. But we are working on tracking this and making certain that we know which incidents end up stacked, so that we can assess how long they're stacked. So you don't know how often you have to do this type of organization to respond to calls? I'm sorry, what do you mean? I'm concerned that you don't know how often this is being deployed. Like, how often have you had to do this? How often have we had to say that we are not going to be able to respond to that immediately? So we're learning how to track that right now. Sure. So, you know, you can see on this chart that if you only have three officers available on a midnight, and both of those shooting incidents that we talked about have happened after the midnight shift, actually, I'm sorry, one of them, they were both post 3am. So they're both in the midnight. If only three officers had been available, then the ability to actually go to a scene like that, to control that scene, to collect evidence, to do initial canvases and witness interviews is extremely circumscribed. I think in both these instances, officers had actually been kept over from the evening shift because the volume was already so high, and that the supervisors on shift were able to retain some of those so that we weren't responding nearly with three officers. But on a regular midnight, those shift officers go home at 0245 in the morning, and the midnight would be what remains. Have you been working with social workers or mental health professionals for them to respond to certain incidents as well? Well, so we have an in-house social worker inside the Burlington Police Department who does a lot of great work during the days and is available to take on certain kinds of tasks, liaises with a lot of folks who need different kinds of services than police can provide. But insofar as what I think you're asking, no, that's something that's in the works. I know that there's a lot of talk about having those kinds of rules. They are what I envisioned with regard to the community support liaison position that was outlined in the public safety continuity plan in January. But those positions are now going to belong to other parts of the city is the anticipation. And so how the Burlington Police Department works with them will be something that we will get to explore. We're very eager to make that happen, though. Did you have to employ this type of priority response this past weekend with those incidents that came up at that party? Yes. Gotcha. Do you know how many incidents you are able to respond to in that time frame because of the staff? If you ask that, and we're working on that. Okay. Well, I was just curious if you knew about that specific incident. That would be when we do it. The only time we would be tracking it is when it happens, and it only is going to happen during times of extreme call volume when other officers are tied up. It's going to occur when we only have two officers remaining and we need to maintain those officers free to respond to another very serious incident rather than deploying them to something like a noise complaint or a call about a trespass in the past. How many active officers do you have on the force right now? 77. 77 are deployable, effective officers, but we have 82 on our books. Okay. Are you concerned at all that announcing that the BPD is going in the direction with this sort of plan because of staffing pressure is going to create fear for residents? I wanted to make certain that we were being as honest and forthright with our neighbors as possible. And the point of this is to make certain that neighbors can know where we are so we can all work on this together and be in this situation together. So I'm very hopeful that in fact this will give neighbors an understanding of the kinds of incidents to which we are responding and the kind of volume that the officers are working on their behalf with and for them as we work to make certain that we have a safe community. You touched on this a little bit, but I just want to go back to a second. You're expected to have 10 CSOs come on board by the end of 2022. Is that correct? We are authorized to bring on 10 during fiscal year 2022. So that begins in July. And the anticipation right now is that we will have six who will be hopefully hired during the first half of fiscal 2022 and four that will be hired during the second half of fiscal 2022. Hiring does not mean that they are immediately available for service. There is a training process. There is a well first after there's a vetting process. There's an application process, a vetting process, then there's a hiring, then there is a long training process. And so all those have to be worked through as we determine how we're going to be able to use these roles. We have two CSOs right now. They are incredibly valuable members of this department. They do a lot of good work for a lot of different kinds of incidents. I'll say that what we have CSOs right now, CSOs right now respond to about 1,200 jobs a year out of about 2,600 total incidents they could respond to. But they don't because they're not on shift all the time and there are only two of them. But the kinds of call categories that they can respond to comprise 2,600 and they respond to 1,200 of those each year. That includes animal problems. They're about 675. That includes lost or found property calls with about 1,000 roadway hazards, fingerprint checks, VIN checks for vehicle identification numbers. Our hope is that A, bringing more CSOs allows the CSOs to dig deeper into the already existing universe of call categories to which they can respond. And B, we want to expand that universe of call categories. We want to expand it potentially to talk about community outreach calls, potentially foot patrol calls, potentially welfare check calls, potentially issuing certain kinds of municipal tickets as well. But all of that is going to require a new training regime because it's not things that the CSOs currently do. And are they going to be in the department of working in the department? Why would you say December? So again, we hire that we we're not going to compromise our hiring standards of course, but we do want these positions available soon. That's why I asked for them in January and created the public safety continuity plan to be able to have some of those gaps filled. So identifying the right candidates, bringing the right candidates aboard and getting them through that process is absolutely a priority for us. I'm asking the question because I'm trying to understand how long Burlingtonians can expect for this type of priority plan to be in place. Do you have any idea as to when the relief might come? We know that there is a light at the end of the tunnel, but we're all in a position right now of trying to figure out how long that tunnel is. Is there more immediate solution? We have a staffing deficit and we have incoming calls. So this is what we have with regard to trying to determine also part of a big component of this was not turning off the midnight. Our community made it clear that they did not want us to go down to a night watch model for our overnight shift. And this forestalls that it may not prevent it entirely depending on how staffing does fall, but this is a means of not doing that. Do we know why the department is experiencing shortages in staffing? Our staffing shortages are a, you know, we had a resolution that talked about getting us down to 74 in order to align with what many community members wanted and that's what we're facing. So, you know, we were presented with a problem in that and we are working on a solution. That's what this is. Any updates on the parties and the gunfire instance this weekend? Do we know how the fight started and who fired the gun? That's an in progress investigation. I'm glad you asked about that because I really would like our community members to help us. Public safety is a shared responsibility and we need community members to assist us in getting more information about those altercations and about the gunfire, but it's ongoing and we don't have anybody in the moment who is, we're not going to talk about specifics on those. We're really helpful that we can get some assistance from our neighbors. And with this summer coming up and, you know, a lot of, the potential for a lot of big parties like the one that we saw this weekend just, and, you know, with bars opening up and just a lot of pent up energy from college students and younger people, are Burlington Police prepared to respond to more incidents like this past weekend? Well, we're prepared because we know they're going to happen. So the point of, you know, a good point of the job of policing is that you take what's thrown at you. Officers show up every day with the intention of keeping people safe with working with and for their neighbors in order to keep people safe and we take what comes. So do we think that there's going to be an increase in volume of incidents? Yes. Do we think that these kinds of incidents may continue? We do. We have certainly have, as I said, the Mayor, excuse me, the Governor easing restrictions or promising these restrictions very soon. We anticipate that when that occurs, we're going to be in a new place. We're going to have a lot of folks who want to come back to our city. That's great. We want them back in our downtown. We want our nightlife and our restaurants working again and we want people coming here and enjoying this great community. But that's going to cause, with it, certain amounts of increases in incident volume. And I also wanted to ask, so tomorrow marks one year since, obviously, that sparked a lot of conversation, the action across the country. What do you believe the Burlington Police will perform and what do you think still needs to be done? Thanks for that question. I hope that the entire country tomorrow takes nine minutes and 29 seconds to remember that murder and Mr. Floyd and what that act has brought into the fore in this country. I hope that it takes the time to recognize that there are paths towards improvement because of that horrible act. It's gratified to see a just criminal outcome. With regard to what we have done as a department, we immediately implemented a procedure and policy of intervention. And then we solidified that policy of intervention of duty to intervene with a full use of force policy that we wrote within. I took a lot of effort in writing that, wrote a good deal of it in conjunction with work that had been done by a large committee to review policing practices comprised of a number of different members of our community that had run from August of 2019 through February of 2020, worked on it with members of the department in here, but ultimately authored what I believe is the single best use of force policy in the state of Vermont and really one that ranks up there with every single good use of force policy in the country. It includes a duty to intervene. It includes a duty of care. It includes restrictions on when certain kinds of force are used. It is incredibly comprehensive policy. It's available online. I'm very proud of it. And I think anybody who's interested in it should look at that use of force policy. It talks about de-escalation, I think 18 times compared to the previous policy which mentioned it once. It is clear that it wants deceleration that's slowing things down. It wants de-escalation that's about finding other kinds of ways to avoid conflict and it wants accountability on the part of officers as they take on what is really their greatest and most I think incredible responsibility which is the ability to keep people safe by sometimes having to use force. It has to be controlled and it has to be done safely. Do you believe there's more that the police department could be doing in terms of police I think that we're in the midst of a lot of that right now. I think we have an assessment that's happening with a company called CNA that was also prescribed by the same resolution that led to the diminishment of the headcount. That is ongoing. I think we're going to learn a lot from them. I think we're going to learn things about how we're managing things inside whether or not we have adequate resources for certain kinds of data collection, certain kinds of tracking. I think we're going to learn about whether or not we have adequate resources for certain kinds of response. I think we're going to learn about whether or not some of those resources are not necessarily best based here but maybe better based elsewhere including responses to certain kinds of incidents such as mental health incidents or others. I think there's a lot to learn from that and there's a lot of reform that can come out of that and I'm eager for all of those things to be explored so that we can get this department functioning even better than it already does. I think we have a world-class police department in Burlington but does that mean that we do not have room to grow or ways in which we can improve how we do what we do? Absolutely not. It does not mean that. We can grow. We are always seeking to improve and be a better police department, serve our neighbors better and to the extent that this assessment and other plans that are coming down the pike have means including the onboarding of CSOs and the public safety and continuity plan have ways of actually maintaining that improvement and that's what we are here for. And you said that assessment is called CNA? CNA is the name of the company. Okay. We wanted to ask about the incident with, I believe his name is Michael Bazuda. Are there any updates in that case and also what the situation is with Kent personally? So I'm not certain what our update is on that. He's arranged. He's due to be arranged today. I don't have an update on what the status of that agreement is. As you know, he shattered several police cruiser windows on windshields, excuse me, on Monday night. He was apprehended safely. He was taken into custody. A judge asked that he be seen by first call, which is a mental health group. First call was not available. The judge then instead ordered that he be released with conditions. Officers followed that instruction but then were able to convince him voluntarily to go to the hospital and gave him transport to the hospital. He told officers sometime during that encounter that he'd be back and he was true to his word because this weekend he came back. He vandalized a civilian member of our department's personal vehicle. We believe that he is associated with a number of other vandalism acts throughout the city also against vehicles. If people find their vehicle keyed and believe that that vandalism occurred on I think it's Friday and Saturday, we asked them to come to us and talk to us about that. Total damages, we are talking probably more than $10,000 now. Our own damages for our cruisers on Monday was $2,800. I think that we are looking at a good number of thousands of dollars more. I know that our civilian employee is looking at a lot about a pocket money for that vandalism. I understand that this individual has had a history of doing this in other parts of Vermont and I understand that there may have been history in other states of doing this as well. To the extent that this poses a real challenge to us all with regard to how we deal with individuals who are recidivists for this kind of behavior, who are costing their fellow citizens significant amounts of money and then most importantly are also a public safety risk. This man assaulted one of my officers after being arrested on Saturday for the acts of keying cars and he assaulted her with bodily fluids. That is an assault on an officer. This is somebody who has assaulted other officers and corrections officers in the past and there is certainly a risk to public safety with an individual like this. I think there's a lot of questions about how we work with all parts of our criminal justice system to ensure that we're all both trying to find treatment for him if he needs it and help him if he needs it, but also make certain that people who are just going about their day in our city and have their property out in our city don't have that property damaged. So overtime has a role. We are using overtime this year. Overtime is something that generally stems from a combination of things. You can have overtime for specific kinds of deployments. For example, we had a, if we have a specific area of the city that is seeing a particular kind of condition, you may create an overtime detail for that. The ability to do that gets much much less, is much less possible when you have fewer officers. Overtime is also created on a per incident basis. So when you have gunfire incidents in the middle of the night, all the officers who are on for that, they're not going home. If they are still needed to control a scene or to collect evidence, et cetera. We have to bring in a detective and a detective sergeant on a Sunday in order to look into those and do witness interviews and canvases. That's overtime. We have overtime that is incurred by training. We have overtime that is incurred by the need to actually cover a shift when there's a gap of the kind that you see here. So that even if our four officers on the midnights are three officers with the availability factor, there's sometimes where that's two officers because one of those officers is also out for sick. He or she is sick or he or she is taking a day that's not contractual leave, but is a day to which they are entitled and they're doing it for a family reason. We need overtime in order to plug those gaps so that we don't have merely two officers on the midnights. That is something that is, that works for a while. And then there are real flaws with that. Overworked officers are not as effective and there are plenty of studies out there that talk about what overtime can and can't do for a police department. Have you considered or have you created an overtime detail for instance like on the weekends or something or parts of the weekend to deal with this situation? So we used to have an entire detail in the Hill section that was about dealing with noise complaints comprised primarily of people who live in the Hill section, oftentimes students, but not only students by any means. That was something that was done in conjunction with the University of Vermont and in conjunction with residents of that part of town. We call that Sierra, but that is a, it was a plan that had incredible, incredible impact on our community. Our community was a good deal rowdier and louder a decade and a half ago and much of that was brought under control by consistent application of that noise patrol detail or the UVM Hill section patrol detail. You, if you only have seven officers on a shift and they are all stretched as it is, bringing additional officers in on their days off becomes less and less tenable. If you started to see more, if there continues to be a threat to public safety, we're going to have to think about how we deploy based on what we have. I think, I think that there's a real, a real value in taking a look at what overtime can mean to a department with regard to performance, with regard to morale, with regard to exhaustion, but none of that takes precedence over public safety. And if we see a pattern of particular kinds of events that have these kinds of public safety concerns, then yeah, that's going to affect our deployment plans. Are you interested in the permit? So, thanks, thanks for asking that. I have been incredibly privileged and proud to serve in this capacity in the police department. I took a 60% pay cut to come back to Vermont, where I was born, back to the city that I was born in and bring my family here and form a relationship with this city. And I am always, always amazed at the caliber of the minimum that I get to work with here. This weekend is a case in point. The work that those officers did with that volume of work, that complexity, those kinds of complex incidents, not just the officers, our dispatchers were talking about, you know, had to feel multiple incidents, had to determine whether or not things were being stacked, had to deal with other agencies because we had to call in mutual aid and assistance from other agencies like UVM, requested South Burlington for assistance as well. That's a huge amount of complex work too. Those men and women are great. I am always, always fortunate to get up every day, think about how to keep men and women in this city safe, and think about how to support the men and women who really do that work in this building. And I am very, very, very confident that I don't think there's somebody who's going to care more about this police department or who is going to have the, you know, the capacity to really look out for the men and women inside this police department and look out for our neighbors. I am hopeful that I'll have an opportunity to examine this role and take a look at the job description that comes out of the mayor's listening tour and his interviews with the public about what they're looking for in a chief. And I'll assess what it is that they're looking for. And I hope that that meets me. I am very, very, very, very, very proud to be part of this police department. And I'm happy to be here in this city. That sounds like you are interested. Dennis, was there anything particular about this? If you wanted to assess the job description that comes out or anything, the direction the city has gone with the department or the expectations for the department that would dissuade you from applying? So I've been in this role for a year now. I have been doing this job for a year. I've been doing it through one of the more significant crises that the city has faced in the police department with regard to the staffing issue, with regard to making certain that we police fairly and safely for large-scale protests, that we police fairly and safely for significant incidents, such as an uptick in gunfire incidents that we experienced last year. And so I'm hopeful that that experience is going to be relevant to being able to take a look at this job. Thank you very much for all of your time. And thank you for those joining and we will make this PowerPoint presentation public very soon.