 I can't hear you. I don't know if it's on my end. I saw Linda join Linda. Can you hear? I can hear you Lauren. I haven't heard anything else. Hi. There we go. We can hear you. Welcome to the third NPA meeting of board eight. We have discussed so far. We're going to talk about the situation in our city regarding. The police department. I'd like to make sure it's Lauren is on and Linda is on. Is anybody else on? Good. Okay. Okay. Do you want to introduce yourself? I don't, I don't see everybody here. Maddie, are you on? Excuse me. Okay. Stick on. Okay. We'll just go ahead. And we want to say, first of all, that we have a three members during committee. It's a bill. And I would like to get into the slide as well. I would like to get into the slide as well. And myself. We're still looking for new ideas. And new members. Particularly people who might be students at the university of Vermont. We are currently reaching out. So they get student leaders to see how we can collaborate. And again, involvement from our students in our ward or with the university. by contacting us by email. We will probably be coming up next month. We haven't decided this for sure, but we'll probably be having a forum for our candidates for the district counselor position to take the place of Jack Hansen, who ends beside me. Are we on, Charlie? It looks like we're done talking. Okay, I think tonight... TV went off, I assume that we're still on screen. Chief, you're on there. Well, since we have limited time, I want to let you start talking. I don't want to waste your time, nor can I want to get as much information as possible. Great. This is Chief Murrach, a resident of Burlington, and a person who grew up in Burlington. Well, I grew up in Underhill. I was born in Burlington back when the hospital was still called Mary Fletcher. Oh, yeah. My parents both taught at the University of Vermont. My father was there for 35 years. Okay. I still remember just walking up the stairs in Waterman to his office. I did shows at Royal Tyler when I was in high school. I spent a lot of, not always behaving well, nights in Burlington in from Underhill, and from, I was class of 91 in Mount Mansford. So I do have deep ties to this place. I love this place. I consider it my home. It is my home now. My wife and I live in the New North End. My kids go to the public schools here. And I'm definitely, I consider myself a part of this city. So thank you so much for having me here today. And thank you to everybody who's at home and watching this. I have brought a presentation that we can go through. However, it's being controlled over there by someone who's I think helping people get in because we're having some access, physical access issues here at the library. It is, I wanna start by saying that I am optimistic about where we can go together as a city and this police department in serving the city. But what news I have about where we are right now is not going to be good. And it's challenging news. You know, we are in the midst of a pretty unprecedented time. I think in the micro sense here you are, your ward has no representation on the city council. There's been tumult and change in that respect. We also have had tumult and change in our city over the past two and a half years. And we have had tremendous tumult and change in our country over the past two and a half years. You know, starting really with a global pandemic with an incredible racial recognition over the murder of George Floyd and attendant protests, et cetera. Some of those driven and exacerbated by what feel like deep political divisions, deeper perhaps than they've been in 150 years. And I think that all of that has contributed a little bit to where we are. I do think there's different weights and measures about how these have all contributed, but here we are. So where are we? We are, if I were able to slide through this with everyone and this is a document that is a report that I produce for the Independent Police Commission on a monthly basis. Every month I create a chief's report for the police commission. They are all located on our transparency and data page at the Burlington Police Department page of the city of Burlington website. And you can see all of them going back almost two years now. And I put a lot of effort into them. I make them myself. We don't currently have a data analyst. I put them together myself with regard to graphics, with regard to data, with regard to the story that we're trying to tell. And that story is one of trying to be transparent with the public about where we are and why we can't do as much as we used to and why we really, we don't serve the community as well as we once did. And I don't like that. I certainly don't like it as someone who has the privilege of leading this department and working with the men and women in it. But there we are. So the first page of that report is a picture of our headcount and our sworn officer headcount. And so it is dropping and that is a challenge for us. It is plummeted since June of 2020 and we are currently at 62 officers and that's actually 60. That's as of October 1st or at 61 because I lost another officer this month. The good news that I talked about is that we are trying to build other capacities other than sworn officers. We have drastically increased the number of community service officers that we have. That was a position that had always existed inside the police department of unarmed, unsworn officers who can do certain quality of life response. They used to work primarily with animals but now we have expanded their role to address noise complaints which I know is something that our neighbors in this ward have concerns about and had concerns about in the past. They also work on non-investigatory or non-injury crashes, a number of different things. We've expanded that role tremendously. We used to have two, we now currently have seven. I'm authorized for 12 and I'm working to hire those positions. And frankly, I can hire them faster than I can hire police officers. There's another role that I didn't just expand upon but invented and it's called Community Support Liaison or CSL. They are in-house social workers that allow us to actually have a social work deployment capacity that bridges gaps in our social service system. Officers go to a scene that has been determined to be unsafe in some way or fashion. A person calls about someone who is overdosed on drugs or a person calls about someone who is threatening or even attempting suicide or a person calls about a dispute that has risen to the level of potentially physical violence and yet seems to be driven potentially by mental health issues. Officers go, they stabilize that, they ensure security at that scene but maybe their next position is to say, I can't do anything more with this. And our CSLs are able to step into that gap. Officers, if they are on duty, a CSL may respond certainly to on duty overdoses when CSLs are in but if they're not, officers will send an email to the CSL group and say, hey, I met with Sarah tonight and Sarah was talking about some suicidal ideation, not enough for us to get her to the hospital tonight but we're concerned about Sarah and we would love it if you could potentially connect with her and then they will. And we've seen a remarkable success in that. I have currently three CSLs and one CSL supervisor or CSS and I'm authorized to have six and I'm working hard to hire the other three. It is my hope that once I am able to upstaff sworn officers we will eventually move into a position of being able to co-deploy these personnel at times when appropriate. That's not all the CSLs will do. The CSLs will remain primarily follow-up case workers in order to bridge social service gaps but if we are able to bring more officers aboard I intend to be able to co-deploy those CSLs and those officers when possible. So officers, we have some potential growth there too. The city council partially reversed its decision from June of 2020 back in October of 2021. And it went from, we had been an agency authorized for 105 headcount. In June of 2020 we were reduced to 74 officers through attrition, officers left in droves that is shown by the graphic that is in the first page of my report. The city then authorized going back to a headcount of 87 which is currently what our authorized headcount is but as I said, we are at 61. So how do we build back those 25, 26 now officers? That's a challenge. Our city gave us a terrific budget. The mayor worked very hard with the city council. The city council voted unanimously on that budget to give us a strong budget for the police department including a rebuilding plan, including upping the number of CSOs from six to 12, upping the number of CSLs from three to six, as I've said. And then we actually got a great contract for our police officers. And that wasn't a unanimous decision by the council but it was a very strong decision by the council. And we have with the mayor's great help a really terrifically strong contract, the best in the region. Those are not currently showing enough for us to grow. We haven't had as much success, frankly over the past two months since we announced that contract as I would have liked. I'd hoped to be able to get some laterals that is pre-officers who are already certified as police officers potentially from other agencies in Chittenden County. And some of those agencies have stolen officers from me as it were from us or from our city as it were over the past two and a half years. And so while I don't want to take my fellow chief's officers, I'm more than willing to do it if it means getting good police officers to serve our community. But we didn't get any. We did not get any even after we announced the contract and a component of that was a sense among the officers that we have, among the officers we've lost and among the officers that we were trying to hire but have thus far been unsuccessful at doing so that the city really hasn't necessarily become an open and welcoming place for police officers. There are concerns around whether or not officers are subject to fair or unfair oversight in the city, whether or not officers are going to be supported if they do things that police sometimes have to do. And that's an ongoing challenge. I'm therefore hopeful to be able to move beyond our borders where those challenges are more acutely felt and out into other parts of the country where frankly those challenges aren't as known and people don't necessarily haven't been watching Burlington closely over the past many years but instead are able to be lured here by the fact that Burlington is a wonderful community. We have a wonderful city. It's a beautiful place to live, to grow up, to raise families. And if we can reach out into other places in the nation, take your pick Pennsylvania or Colorado or Oregon or wherever and bring people here, I think that's gonna be our quickest route to actually growing again, to moving up that 25 Officer Hill. Can I ask a good question? Of course you may. If you do recruit officers from outside the state, would you be confident that once they came here they would feel supported? I don't know the answer to that yet. I know that what I do know is this, some of the officers I've lost over the last two and a half years are actually seeking to come back. They're finding that things aren't all that different in other places in so far as things and they're finding that this is actually a good department to work in. I'm proud to say that I have managed to have a very good relationship with my union and I have a strong relationship internally with officers. I feel that I have their support. They certainly have mine and they know it. And I think that is important. I'm also working every day to remind them that this community does need them and value them and want them and we want good police officers. And I do think that we can get officers from other places to come here and dig in and stay. Some of our best officers are from other places. So in the PowerPoint, and I don't know the degree to which it's being shown to the audience or not, sure. There is a page on our priority response model. And I think that's about to pop, it's the third page. So the second page, which you can show very quickly is the headcount chart that I talked about. That's not a great look that plummet. The next page please is our priority response plan. And this was devised in order for us to be able to address that falling headcount while we're also experiencing an increase in calls for service, particularly what you'll later see, we call priority one calls for service. Those are the ones that are in dark blue with white lettering. Those are the ones that are life safety. We're always gonna go to those. They're not the bulk of our overall calls. They are about a third or a quarter of overall calls, but they're the ones that we always go to. The ones that are in white with black lettering are priority three. And we often cannot make it to those. The reason is this, and instead what we've done, as you can see is we've assigned many to CSOs in a yellow or to online reporting that golden color. And the ones that aren't CSO or online reporting are still officer response, but we often are not able to go. And the reason is that when we have serious incidents involving life safety, almost all of those priority ones, they require a two officer response. And on many days, we are only fielding three or four officers for the entirety of the city. That's three or four officers to cover 45,000 people, three or four officers to cover 15 plus square miles, three or four officers to be available for these important calls, these priority ones where life safety is at stake. When that occurs, I need two officers. So it works like this, if I have four officers on shift, any call that comes up gets an officer, assuming it's a one officer response. So it's lesser, it's a priority two or a priority three. The next call also will get an officer, but now I'm down to two officers available only. Nothing else will go except for priority one. Now, if a priority one call comes in, I'm sending those two officers and potentially even breaking the other two officers away from whatever they're doing to go to that scene, but I'm not going to any of priority threes or priority twos while those two officers are on, we're on that prior one status. And that's when we have four. If we only have three officers, you can see how very quickly we go straight to priority one and that's where we are for the rest of the shift. So that is a challenge for us. And it is a challenge for our neighbors. And it's a challenge for me in hearing from neighbors who feel dissatisfied and underserved. It's a challenge for officers who hear it. It's a challenge for business owners and people who reside in the city, people who are visiting our city who are not getting the kinds of service we got when we had nine and eight officers on a shift and never did this. This is new. And it was required by where we are staffing-wise. Say how often that's happening. Well, so we only, what this involves is doing something called stacking a call. So a call that comes in that we cannot answer because we are in priority one is called stacked. And if you move, I'm pleased to the next page, you'll see, this is our incident volume as of October 15. And so these are all year-to-date, year-to-date in 2017, 18, 19, et cetera. You'll see that the overall incident volume has fallen over the past several years. It's risen this year over last year and the year before. We've actually passed 2020 and 2021. I can explain a little bit more about what makes up these calls, but underneath there you see that we've stacked about 16% of the calls. So about 16% of calls that come in do not get an immediate response and sometimes no response at all. And that is a little bit misleading because it's more than that owing to the fact that we divert a number to online reporting as the previous slide showed that there's a number of those types of calls. For example, if it's a bad check, if somebody's reporting a bad check or embezzlement or a theft of rental property, that is an online report. If it's happening in real time, it's not a theft of rental property, it's a larceny in progress and we will go to those if officers are available. But so those aren't stacked, those are online reported. So in fact, the number to which we don't respond with great regularity is higher than 16, unfortunately. Next page, please. Thank you. So this is just a way of looking at the total incident volume. I call these spaghetti graphs. I like them because they really give you a sense of where we are in a year and how things are changing or not. The thick black line is this year. And as you can see, it's finally nudged over 2020. It's been over 2021 for quite some time. It has not yet touched 2019, 18, 17, but there's a point that I make in this and I don't know that I made it quite as articulately as I should, it came up as an issue in an MPA last night in 4-7. It came up as an issue during the police commission meeting on Tuesday, which is this, a good portion of the difference in total call volume from previous years to this year isn't that people are not calling us. It comes from a diminishment in proactive officer actions, mostly traffic stops and foot patrols. Traffic stops and foot patrols do not come because people are calling us and saying, there's a car racing down North Avenue, go stop it. That happens sometimes, but the vast majority of traffic stops are driven by officer proactivity. I see a behavior and I take action against that. We had disparities in our traffic stops, real racial disparities, and we drastically reduced the number of traffic stops that we make over the past several years. That was at both an agency decision. That was a community decision that was driven by reports by then professor, well, she's still a professor, but then professor and now police commissioner, Stephanie Saguino, around traffic stops around the state and in Burlington as well. And we have gone from making as many as 2,700 traffic stops at this time in 2017 to making, we've made fewer than 400, actually quite a bit fewer, barely over 300 at this time in 2021, excuse me, 2022. If we were still doing traffic stops at the same volume as we used to, that black line would be much closer to 2017. It would be over 2018. So what I'm trying to say by that is that it is proactivity that has driven down incident volume more than a diminishment in calls for service from the public. The public is still calling the police and the police, unfortunately or not, it's able to come. Can you do the next slide, please? These are our priority one incidents, those dark blue ones with the white lettering from that first page and they are higher than they've been in the past five years. They are, in fact, September of 2022, saw more priority ones than any year since we started tracking using this Valkor system, which was implemented in 2012 by then chief, Mike Shirling. The priority one incidents, it's alarming, the rate at which they've gone up. Priority ones do correlate in part with crime, but they're not only crime. There are priority one incidents that are dropped 911 calls, overdoses, a roadway hazard is a priority one. And a priority one is determined by our need to deploy. When do we have to send an officer because people's safety could be at risk? So it's not necessarily automatically a crime, and therefore this significant increase is an automatically indicative of crime increases, but I do have some further data later on that shows that certain crime categories are in fact up. Next slide, please. That is shown on this page, and I'm gonna move past this page relatively quickly because it's just a lot of numbers, and I encourage people to go online and look at through these themselves, but the next page that I'm gonna show is takes these numbers and gives us a picture of where we are this year relative to where we have been. Can you move through to the next one, please? Thank you. So this takes the five year, year-to-date average from 2017 through 2021. I took those tables that you saw on the previous page and I added up 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, divided by five and compared it to where we are currently in 2022. And this is what we have. We are down with domestic assaults. That is a good thing. I have maintained a domestic violence prevention officer despite the fact that I have had to denude myself of almost every other specialized role in our department. And the reason I've done that is because our DVPO, who is an officer named Aaron Bartle, terrific, terrific officer, she does more work in that position than she would otherwise do if I were to deploy her to the road. If I just, I would make one shift on one day, stronger by one officer, but by keeping her in her role, other officers give their DV incidents to her. She follows up. I do believe that a portion of this domestic assault decrease may be owing to good work on her part and our domestic violence victims advocate. We have an in-house victims advocate who reaches out to domestic violence victims. I apologize for that. And is really extraordinarily good at what she does and has been with us for a very long time. That said, I also think a portion of that decrease may be lack of reporting. And I think that comes back to, we do have ongoing issues around trust. We have ongoing issues around police legitimacy. Can that be a component of domestic assault of sexual assault? I believe it may be. These others are a little different because oftentimes they occur in public places and the reporting isn't a matter of do I trust somebody or do I wanna go forward with my report but it's people calling in as things are happening. And we see that a lot of those are in fact, significantly up. Domestic disturbance not up by much, although that's partly because domestic disturbances in 2020 skyrocketed because everybody was at home and suddenly everything was a domestic disturbance instead of a disturbance on the street or in the public sphere. And so that one number of 2020 actually really skews the average from 2017 to 2021. But nevertheless, domestic disturbances are up a little bit over the average. Robberies are up, aggravated assaults are up quite a bit. And then we get into the ones that are really, really troubling where we have larceny up almost 100%. We have overdoses up nearly 200%. We have gunfire as we all know has been troubling our city and stolen vehicles up tremendously. I am still trying to wrap my head around why that is and what it is and how we can address it. With regard to gunfire, I will say that we actually made a very, very important arrangement today. We announced charges against a man who we alleged murdered Hussain Mubarak on July 7th in the old North End. And I believe that that arrest coupled with an arrest of another man who had committed a series of three shootings in a very short time span has, I'm hopeful, I wanna be careful, but I think we may have gotten a handle on some of the gunplay for the time being and I can only hope that's gonna be the case. The next slide please shows that gunfire, right? And so the top graph shows it by order of occurrence in the respective year and then the bottom graph shows it by type of incident. The red dots are homicide by gunfire and not all are homicides. There's currently a trial ongoing for a man who murdered his wife with a cleaver. That would not be included in this. These are only the gunfire homicides that Burlington's experienced. The dark blue boxes with a little X through them, but you may not be able to see that from here are incidents in which a person was struck by gunfire, a shooting. The light blue boxes are incidents in which we know that gunfire was directed at a person, whether that's from video evidence or from complainants. And then the white boxes are incidents where we know that gunfire occurred. We have probable cause that gunfire occurred and reasonable suspicion that it occurred in a criminal way. A hunting discharge in the New North End out over the lake would not be considered a gunfire incident. A suicide by firearm in a person's home would not be considered a gunfire incident. An incident in which a person is cleaning his or her firearm and discharges it would not be considered a gunfire incident unless there was something extremely reckless about it. A person's drunk, he's doing it in the middle of a party where lots of people are around, we might charge that. But at your home having an accident would not. These are criminal incidents. And the spike that we've seen since 2020 is shocking. Next slide please. A different way of looking at our available officers. So one of the things that frustrates people is hearing that we only have 21 officers on patrol when we have 62 officers. And as I said, it's actually 61 now. We lost one since I made this chart. Well, the reason is this. Of our 62, 10 are unavailable to us. They are on leave. They are on injury leave. They are at the VPA, the Vermont Police Academy. I have three officers currently at the Vermont Police Academy. We have an officer who is unfortunately still on administrative duty owing to an officer involved shooting. I'm incredibly hopeful to get a resolution on that shooting very soon. The Vermont State Police concluded its investigation and it has gone to the Attorney General. And I want a resolution on that because I have full confidence in that officer and I'm eager to be able to make my own determination once that case is concluded. That officer is in that 10. Then there are 13 supervisors. We actually have 15 supervisors but two of them are included in the 10. So 13 supervisors gets us to 39. Nine officers who are assigned to detectives. That is 36 officers who are assigned to the airport and must be by federal law. That is 24. I have three special assignments. An officer who is a recruiting officer. An officer who is a domestic violence prevention officer as I mentioned before. And I have one officer who is currently assigned to narcotics in the detective bureau on a rotating. They serve for four months at a time. They get to be in the narcotics unit. It allows us to have some career path growth. It definitely helps us with ongoing complaints around narcotics activity. And so those three specialized leave us at 21. That is 21 non-supervisory sworn officers available for patrol. It doesn't count my CSOs. It doesn't count the CSLs. It doesn't count the fact that there are sergeants on patrol but sergeants don't answer radio calls on patrol. They are sergeants and they are supervisors. And we need them to back up officers, et cetera. And then the pie chart just shows you visually how all that breaks down. Next please. And I'm cognizant. I wanna be able to let people have questions. Building other capacity. This page describes the community service officers that I discussed and also the community support liaisons that I mentioned. And we've currently got seven and three. I'm authorized for 12 and six. And I'm hopeful that I've got some in the pipeline right now. I just hired a young member of our new American community into a CSO role. That's something that both the community has spoken about. And I want very deeply to be able to hire from our city better and bringing someone in into the CSO role and transitioning eventually hopefully to police officer if that's what the person wants to do is a goal. I have in fact, it's very funny actually of the two CSL CSOs that you see in the lower corner one of those is going to end up being in our police academy next time. I have a young CSO who I've just sent to the police academy. He's one of the three that's currently down there. So we are using that role as a way to get the people's feet in the water of policing in the water of Burlington. And then we get to judge them based on, you know their performance, et cetera. And if they weren't maybe quite ready to be police officers in so far as their background or their resume when they first applied, we put that we were able to use them as a CSO for a certain period of time and then bring them aboard. The CSOs are very different. Very few of the CSOs are going to transition to police officer work. It's not what they're there for. They are generally social workers. Although I do have a police officer who was a street outreach worker and he brings that extra ethos and skill set to the job as a cop now. But these CSOs are, you know that's not something that they're going to go do. Next page please. This is an analogy to give an idea of where CSOs fall in. Some people think that CSOs are supposed to be in my deployment plan and they're not because they're not out roaming the city any more than detectives are out roaming the city. And that's why I put them on the same rung of this graphic. Patrol is out patrolling the city and so are CSOs. Street outreach is out patrolling the city. The Howard Center street outreach team that's routinely on the marketplace and goes to other parts of the city as well but mostly in the marketplace. Both of those roles patrol street outreach can refer jobs up to detectives or to CSOs. Something happened that goes beyond the ability of a patrol officer to dig into it from an investigatory standpoint. Something happens that goes that is a street outreach worker witnesses an assault but it's in the past. Patrol officers isn't gonna handle that. They're gonna refer that to detectives. And with regard to casework, we refer it to CSOs. If it has a mental health component or a substance use disorder component or a houselessness component. And so that's how we analogize. And then we have in the police, we have an ERU or emergency response unit. It uses that big truck that we have called the ERV. It is they are specially trained officers. They work together on a regular basis. They do crisis incidents, barricaded persons, active shooters, should we ever have one of those? And I pray that we do not high-risk warrants. We executed such a warrant this morning in conjunction with that arrangement that I talked about. And then we have a crisis response that we are working to create. The city is working to create this. I don't like using the term Kahootz which refers to a very specific program in Eugene, Oregon but it's a shorthand that many people are familiar with. We are working to create a crisis team. It has not moved as quickly as it should. That is on me. The mayor has been very driven to have this. Council President Paul is very enthusiastic about it as well. We had a very, very busy summer and we're not quite as far along as we should be. I have just hired an implementer to help us get that program off and running. We promulgated an RFP, we got responses. Now we're trying to figure out how we can get a vendor to come in and create this crisis team for our city. Next slide, please. This is just a quick look at patrol shifts. This was produced for something, some of you may have seen Vermont State Police in the downtown. They are working on Wednesdays and Thursdays and Fridays and Saturdays. It's a voluntary job on their part. One or two of them come up, they work a shift. They are merely patrol presence on foot in that location only. They don't answer the radio, they won't pick up jobs or calls for service even in their immediate vicinity. They are presence, but we are using it to augment our currently inadequate resources. I put this together for the city council to demonstrate what we used to have and what we used to field in so far as resources. And you see May of 2019 there, you see May of 21 when I first introduced the priority response model. And it was a different, we didn't have the CSO and the on-lines. That's part of the modification that I was compelled to introduce this year. And then you see where we are now. And it is, it's a stark difference. Next page, please. Okay, the next pages are really relevant to my presentation of the police commission and not so much to all of you. This is something I put in because I know that these are sometimes looked at by prospective officers. And if an officer thinks that that's where he gets to go or she gets to go and do her annual qualifications, that's an attractive piece. Excuse me, this is, that's one of the most beautiful spots in the world. It's out in Jericho and I'm answering in the background. Great place to have to spend two days a year with a very important part of our repertoire that we thankfully do not use with any frequency. So actually, I'll move on to questions now because the next slides are about our trip to the IACP which I think is interesting, but not relevant to us. Excuse me. All right. So I've just gone on for quite some time and I'm happy to take some questions, et cetera. Is anybody out there who's listening have a question? Could you put your hand up? Oh, Linda, Linda. Yeah, yeah. Hi, I'm just gonna bring my phone board here. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the police that are coming from the state that you just mentioned helping out and how is it working out? And what kinds of things do they do and does the city pay for that or does that have to come out of your budget? Yeah, thanks, great question. So we work with the Vermont State Police all the time in a collaborative and partnership kind of way. We call them in at times when we need assistance with a large crime scene or they have a drone, we do not. We used a drone, for example, to search for the suspect on the night that Hussein Mubarak was murdered in the old North End. But we also brought them in on August 13th after a series of shootings that we'd had downtown. We had a large number of VSP come in and deploy. I worked that night as well. And then we did it again on September 3rd for the Labor Day, excuse me, yes, for the Labor Day weekend. And then unfortunately experienced a murder that very night in City Hall Park while I and a number of other troopers were actually just a block away. So those were large scale deployments of up to 10 troopers including high rank officers like a major. And those were done by the state. The state sent that to us owing to unique circumstance. The new deployment that we're talking about is it's voluntary, it's out of my budget based on the fact that I'm budgeted for 87 but I currently have 61. So there's some savings there. I'm using that money in part to pay these troopers. There hasn't been a huge number of them. You'll see them every now and then. But the budget for the nominal budget for the total number of hours that was potential in the arrangement was upwards of, I think, I wanna say 30 or $40,000. It was a lot of money, maybe it was even higher. I can't remember now. I presented it to the Board of Finance. It's been about 4,000 to 5,000 that we've spent. So we're way below the nominal, right? Meaning that it had planned for having up to four troopers for eight hours a night. On a voluntary basis, they come from wherever they come. Some from as far as St. Johnsbury or farther south in the state. We pay their travel time. We pay for them to be here. They are on foot in the vicinity of Church in Maine, up and down Church Street in City Hall Park. And also they're told to focus a little bit on the parking garage because we'd had some shooting incidents there. But have they come, have we had eight officers, eight troopers rather for, you know, or four troopers for eight hours shift on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday? Absolutely not. We haven't. We've had them in dribs and drabs two here, one there for four hours at a time on a Wednesday, four hours at a time on a Thursday. I am in discussions with the mayor about whether we renew for another month. I think there is merit to it. On the upside, it hasn't been that expensive. It hasn't been that expensive on the downside. You know, it hasn't been quite as robust as we perhaps would have liked, but I'm gonna discuss with the mayor whether to renew that contract for another month. Thank you. Do you have a question? So I have several questions, but I'm not seeing the hand raised thing Keith. So I don't know what you would like me to do. Can you hear me? Yes, I can hear you. I could quite hear what you're saying. She can't see the hand raised function. So I think she's worried about whether or not she's stepping in line or cutting in line, but I don't actually see anybody in line, Maddie. Okay, so I've lived on hunger for tears for a very long time. For me, quality of life issues, i.e. student noise is my big focus, unfortunately. And I get, I was totally not in favor of the defunding of your department or the decrease or any of it. So it was very troubled. And I really tried to be very careful about like when I called how bad the noise was, because obviously gunfire safety overdoses, which the city's been played with since the pandemic, obviously Trump noise, but for me getting sleep at night is a problem. And so I have been very reticent to call. So I'm a little bit confused if you have officers like Thursday, Friday, Saturday night just devoted to noise complaints and I should start calling, I've been not calling basically because of your number situation. So, and I have two more questions after that. Well, I'll answer this one as quickly as I can. Thank you for feeling that way, but you don't have to. If you're having a noise complaint call, and here's why. When I first introduced the priority response model in 2021, we really did curtail noise complaint response. But now that I have more CSOs and I'm building that capacity even larger, it's CSOs who go to noise complaints, not police officers anymore. And so CSOs are not part of the priority response model. The CSOs just take what comes in and then they go to the next one. And if they're all currently engaged, then the call that comes in doesn't get a response until someone's not engaged. But there's no model by which we have people actively waiting in a way that firefighters do, right? Firefighters wait for a call to come rather than going out and patrolling. And that's sort of the posture that we're in because of this priority response model, but it doesn't apply to our CSOs. So when you have a noise complaint, please call. The CSOs will come. We do continue to have a weekend noise complaint detail that officers are allowed to sign up for. Officers from UVM are allowed to sign up for. It is voluntary and they don't. And there's a variety of reasons that they don't. It's because we are working them to the fingertip bone on a daily basis. They're getting overtime at the front end and the back end of their own shifts at times. I have not yet given in to what other departments across the country have with regard to mandatory overtime, but they do work a lot of overtime. And so the idea of doing more overtime, especially on a day where they'd otherwise be home isn't that appealing. It's not appealing to them because of their work situation. There's also a generational aspect. Newer employees tend not to want to work when they're not supposed to be at work. That tends to be a sort of thing that we are seeing across a number of different professions. And then unfortunately there is also a piece which is they don't want to take the University of Vermont's money. They don't feel the university was supportive of them. The university very quickly distanced itself from this. It totally canceled the noise complaint in the summer of 2020, just got rid of the program because it said, oh, we better not have cops on campus. They saw that, they knew it, they don't like it. So I post for it every week. I'm hopeful that we can get some signups for it but I'm not all that enthusiastic. What I am enthusiastic about is the fact that we have these new roles whose job it is to go to those. And you should feel no concern about calling when you hear something, that's their task. So as part of what I was gonna ask, so that UVM adding, I mean, there was a while there where they were just regularly doing for patrol in this neighborhood and it made a huge difference. And UVM isn't interested anymore in doing that is what you're saying. No, no, UVM wants that and UVM is now paying for it again. But the officers won't do it because UVM canceled it for a period of time in 2020. And the officers said, okay, then no thanks. And they still feel that way. Okay, all right. And then my last thing is, so, and I don't know how to say this tactfully. So I'm just gonna say it truthfully. So I call from time to time, I have had different issues over the years and it just seems I get a very different response depending upon who's on dispatch. Yes. And obviously I don't know their names, but I will say that there's often a woman, I don't know if she's still on, because I said I don't call that much anymore for my noise complaints, that seems annoyed that I've called, that I'm calling for noise or something trivial. And she almost is like frustrated with me where when a male answers, and like I said, I'm not trying to be sexist, but whenever a male answers, they're very helpful, they're very accommodating. And this summer, my car was rifled through. My husband thought I locked the car, he thought I locked the car, no one locked the car. And it was ransacked. I mean, everything was everywhere. There was not much in it to steal. So they took some money and this happened to us, let's say, 10 years ago, because I've lived on the same hunger for terrorists for 40 years. And back then you called, the police came out, they made a report, and then you called your insurance. Even if not much was taken, so I thought that was still the protocol I called and they just brushed me off and they just said, you can do that online. And I said, well, don't you want to hear like, when it happened? No, just, and there was like, no, gosh, sorry that happened. And maybe they're just too busy and they're stressed or strung out because you're so low in numbers, but I would just say the dispatch people need to realize that when you're calling, no matter what your personal incident is, even if it's not like life and death or somebody's overdosing to you, you've made that, like you're telling me to call, I weigh the situation if I'm gonna call or not. So then to get somebody to just brush me off or kind of be rude to me at times, I just want to share that with you. I thank you for sharing that with me. I don't like hearing it, but I'm glad to hear it. We, our dispatch is down to six when it should be 12. And even 12 was an understaffed sender. We have three desks that we use. We have two police desks that is two phones and two computers that dispatch police and one that dispatches fire. And when you have 12 people running three desks 24 hours a day, it actually works out to 42 hours per person with no acknowledgement of vacation or break or anything. So at 12, we were understaffed. At six, we are actively, we're really in a dangerous place. We've made some efforts to try to fix that and address it. That does not excuse the customer service that you're describing. And I know I've had some issues. I recently had to, there was recently an issue with a dispatcher, there was a news article about a dispatcher saying something to a person reporting a vehicle on the bike path. I issued discipline in that case and that dispatcher resigned and went to the University of Vermont, I believe as a dispatcher. I have also, you know, I'm working with some of the dispatchers. We're desperately trying to keep the ones we have but I'm not going to do so at the expense of customers. And I just wrote down the time that we're having this discussion because I am gonna make them watch this and I want them to see what somebody says about it. Now that said, that said, not, you know I think they need to hear it. I better not call for a while then, just kidding. That said, the ultimate answer that they're going to give you isn't going to change. Rifle, having your car rifled through is a priority three online response at this point. We do not have resources to go do it. A community service officer can't go take that response. A community support liaison is not gonna go take that. That's not a mental health or social work kind of job. It's a police officer job that it used to be and it's not right now because we don't have enough of them. So it is an online response. But I guess even if the person acknowledged, I can't explain it, but they just- Kindly. Right, they really blew me off. You know, I'm upset. My car was rifled through, stuff is everywhere. You know, they took loose change, whatever else they could take. I mean, and they just were like- Yeah. They were in a big hurry to get off the phone with me and it just didn't feel right. And I'm sorry for that. And that's not acceptable. What I will say is that, you know, what I try to impress upon officers and I should do a better job of talking it over with dispatchers as well is that, you know, we go to things as police officers or as public safety professionals that are routine for us, but are hopefully once in a lifetime experiences for the people with whom we're dealing, right? Not always. We have plenty of people who have been through the situations almost as often as we have because we've been through it with them again and again and again. But that's not what we're talking about here. What we're talking about here is, you know, the car accident or the accident in the home or the psychotic break out of nowhere that is a once in a lifetime experience for our public and our neighbors and is something that for us is like, yeah, that's Tuesday but we can't treat it like Tuesday and we have to acknowledge that for the people we serve it can be something that rises to the level of even trauma in a true definition of trauma, not an experience I didn't like but an experience that actually affects my function on some level, even if it's not that for police officers so or dispatchers for that matter. So I take to heart what you said I thank you for saying it and I am gonna do something with it. Sorry, yeah, I don't mean to take up too much time. Yeah, those were my questions. I'm gonna be a listener. Why don't we respect the custodian at the library and get a union member so we want to make sure we respect this contract. We really respect your time here and thank you. I know you're so busy but we really appreciate the information you gave and it sounds like we need to talk to you again later. We will do that. Happy to do so, you know, my dream and I'll very quickly end with this. My dream is a sunny day on the waterfront where we have 5,000, 44,000, 45,000 Berlin Tonians on the waterfront looking up at a drone saying we want good police. We want good police in this community and then police saying and we are good police and wanna be good police for this community. That's what we need to get people back to this community. That's what we need in order to attract. That's my end. I don't know how to get there. We're working on it. We have money because of the city council and the mayor. Mayor Weinberger has been incredibly supportive of this agency. How we get to that step is something that occupies me on a daily basis but that's what we need. We need that kind of sense and that does not say anything you guys wanna do is okay, police, go to it. That's not the same thing. It is saying we want good police. We recognize that they are necessary. We recognize frankly that abolition is absurd and that we are in a place instead where we need to understand that we can try to develop other resources and someday we can even get those resources and start to mix and match like a sound board but we need good police. We need them in our community and our community needs to feel more like it used to than it currently does. Well, thank you very much and thank you for joining us for our third FBA. We'll probably see you next month. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you, chief Marin. Thank you.