 Welcome everyone. Thank you and thank you for your patience as we're getting started a few minutes late here. We are here today to talk about our beloved downtown and the steps that we are taking to support its economic recovery from the pandemic and ensure that it remains what has long been an authentic vibrant public space that is full of economic opportunity and one that is safe, welcoming and inclusive for all. It almost goes without saying that the last two years have been a time of unprecedented challenge for our 40 year old church through marketplace. The pandemic, the pandemic kept people out of the downtown and represented an existential threat, especially early on that we were initially not certain we would survive without massive loss of businesses. We worked to combat that in a whole variety of ways. Very proud of the team and city effort and community effort that protected our downtown, protected our organizations and businesses work to get massive federal relief dollars from the federal government to Burlington businesses and organizations and an equitable and rapid way. And in 2021, our second summer of the pandemic, we saw many hopeful signs of recovery. The downtown experienced relatively few closures to many other organizations visits the downtown and to the city rebounded. We opened the newly renovated City Hall Park and the fountain as part of it and we saw greater use of the park that we had seen in decades with children playing and residents eating meals that just weren't physically possible previously. The major festivals returned to the downtown and someone modified form and we hosted a major new Juneteenth celebration for the first time. Numerous retailers and hotel orders have told me that 2021 was not just a better year than 2020 it was one of one of and in some cases the best year that some retailers had ever experienced. At the same time, we experienced problematic challenges in our downtown in 2021. Too often last summer we experienced disruptive intimidating and even dangerous incidents in City Hall Park and on the marketplace. With a declining number of officers the city struggled to maintain a public safety presence in our downtown. Incidents in City Hall Park for some youth programming to be relocated. And even while we can continue to enjoy a large number of visitors to our downtown. Too many of those visitors and often female employees of downtown businesses reported that they felt unsafe. Many people said they shared this with me directly Brawntonians visitors employees. And today we are taking action. This kind of experience in our downtown is unacceptable and what we're laying out today is a plan to turn this around and to protect our downtown. Turning this around is not going to be easy. We continue to face heightened levels of social and economic disruption in the wake of the pandemic. And as Chief John Murad will work through in a moment, while we have begun a robust effort to rebuild the department, the number of police officers available for deployment has declined further since last year, increasing our challenge. The city is fully committed doing all that we can to ensure that downtown Brawnton continues to be a great public space where everyone feels welcome and safe. To that end, today we are announcing a downtown public safety and activation plan. There are four major elements of this plan. And I've got a number of department heads here and I'm going to turn it over a moment to have them walk through these different elements but I'm going to outline them to start. First, in recent weeks we have already changed the way in which our officers are deployed to increase the presence of police officers in the downtown. And Chief Murad will walk through the details of that. Second, we are supplementing the police presence with new and expanded investments in numerous other public safety resources. And to give you a sense of how this is going to work, we have some of the members of the team that is going to augment the police response here with us today. I'm here with Corporal Kevin Wilson, who is a longtime member of the department. We also are joined here by one of our new CSOs, Nick Moore. People will remember historically the city has had one or two community service officers we now have eight and that program may expand even further over the year ahead. And Nick has been with us about five months and we appreciate his service. We're also we have a whole new capacity that we really did not have in the police department before the last year and that's our community service liaison program. Anthony Jackson Miller is one of our three new CSOs also a program that we may expand further in the year ahead and welcome Anthony thank you for being here. Street outreach has long been part of the city's public safety response and representing the street outreach team we have Tammy Buddha here street outreach team. In recent years has dropped to around four street outreach workers, most of the time, there's now funding in place to expand that to six were currently at four but there's hope. There's optimism about that expanding in the relatively near future and the funding is in place to do that. We also have Neil Preston here, and Neil is one of our first ever Urban Park Rangers, which is another new program launched by the city. In the last year next to Nick is is Aaron Moreau who is playing a key role managing and overseeing this new Burlington Parks Recreation and Waterfront initiative. We have a lot of detail on these new programs and the presentation come. It's exciting to be with all of you here today, thank you for being here. The third kind of element of this public safety and activation plan is to expand our capacity to offer help to individuals in need of support, and that is part of what the CSL program and the, and the expanded street outreach program is about. It's also, we're not going to talk a lot about it today happen to answer questions it's also why we're pushing so hard to have the new Elmwood Avenue community resource center and shelter pod community in place, so that the city is in position to offer more help than we have in the past. The final element of this plan is to activate the downtown and waterfront with a record number of events over the course of the summer between now and the fall there will be over 140 programmed events in the downtown waterfront area and to speak to some of those events that activation. We have director Cindy white director car on this row and director during craft. In closing, I just want to add a few more things I see this plan that we are announcing today as an important part of the community recovery which I focused on in my state of the city last month. We have been through a historically traumatic and isolating time that has affected all of us and has made all of our social challenges of society worse to fully recover from this period economically and socially our downtown must be a place where everyone regardless of race or class feels safe and welcome to gather connect and reconnect to eat shop enjoy all that our city has to offer. We believe this kind of downtown, we have long had and enforced basic civil laws, civic laws and ordinances. We will continue that practice this summer, looking to the police to enforce these basic rules when necessary with patience, respect, adherence to this community is high standards for police conduct. I'm grateful for the continued service of the Burlington police officers to keep our community safe. And I want all of them to know they have my support in this essential work. I also again want to thank the numerous other department heads city employees and outside partners who will implement this downtown public safety and activation plan. I haven't seen any partners I haven't recognized yet and and I want to just take a moment to do so. I appreciate seeing counselor. Joe McGee here with us. Kelly divine, the executive director of the Bronx Business Association long time. Long time key partner to the city, especially down at town issues. Thank you for being here. Kelly, I don't think I recognize the organization that can be works for which is the Howard Center I want to recognize their their leadership in this as well. Our community collaborated to get through the pandemic better than just about any other city in the country through a remarkable team effort. And together, we will forge a successful recovery, the same kind of city and community collaboration. With that, I will, we'll now get into some of the details in a turn. Speaking roll over to chief mirad and I think I'm going to try to keep the PowerPoint and sync with you up here as you do so. You want. Okay, I see we're going to rotate through the microphone. Okay. So, he got an invention or you get a message. Okay. So everybody, thank you very much for being here with us today, and coming to hear some of the plans that we have in store for the city and particularly the downtown. I'm just going to briefly go through the plan and then obviously I think the mayor is going to make an opportunity for questions at the end and also others will speak before we get to that question period. So we're going to talk about how we used to police the city. When we were a fully staffed organization, we were able to engage in a community policing model that was really dedicated to having a large number of officers in specific areas around the city, where those officers would have connectivity to those areas. And the people and the problems and the potential of each area in a way that was very consistent and that steady connection was incredibly important for the kind of community policing that this agency and the city deserved and had for about 25 years. Here we see a picture of that this is an eight officer shift. We do not show supervisors, supervisors don't answer radio calls for service and so they're not displayed in this area model. This shows non supervisory officers. It does not show one CSO, which was our old model one community service officer, primarily handling issues around animal and certain other kinds of tasks assisting police officers with traffic control at scenes, etc. We've expanded that role, as we have been reduced with regard to police officers, but we had a area in the new north end B area which was essentially the old north end, D, which was essentially the hill section in college D, which was the downtown core and the area the south end. What we have been doing for the past year plus as headcount fell after the decision made in June 2020. We have seen fewer officers on each shift and being unable to have eight officers and a full complement for area based policing we have moved to a model that was primarily covering north and south. The city council really had functioned with six and oftentimes fewer police officers, sometimes only five or four, and still only had one CSO. What we will be doing is leveraging the CSO is that we've brought a board as part of our public safety continuity plan, which we presented to the city council last year and the city council approved. We have great support from the mayor in order to create this public safety continuity plan which brought a board additional community support officers created the community support liaison position and addresses the fact that we are not staffed the way we used to be. Historically more than 50% of our calls for service have occurred in a circle that surrounds downtown core. We are going to focus on that part of town where more than 50% of our calls for service are with what remains of our resources which are fewer than 50% of historical norms. We are going to have two officers when we have four officers on a shift, and we don't every day. Some days there are fewer. So when we have four or more officers on a shift, we will have to in the downtown core to CSOs in that downtown core, and one officer as a rover north and one officer as a rover south. We call this the city center area plan to connect it to the area model that has been so successful for the police department, and which the officers inside the department are tremendously invested in. They want to be area based community policing officers. So the city center area basically takes a bulk of what used to be be and the bulk of what used to be D and parts of what used to be C, and gives that the focus of the resources that we have. This may mean that response times outside this area may experience delays. Officer being assigned to the area does not mean that he or she can only patrol there. It means that that is where he or she is located until called elsewhere areas of proactive patrol and officer focus will be around the marketplace. City Hall Park, the Fletcher Free Library, North Winooski Avenue, the downtown transit center and Elmwood Avenue. And it's not merely officers and CSOs who are part of this. There are a number of resources available to us that we have been both augmenting and building new. So the community service officers again as the mayor said, we've had these positions for many years, but normally only had one on the day shift and none on the evening shift. And that is important because we have also changed our priority response model to take a number of what were priority three calls and make them CSO only response. We have the CSOs, we will have beach and parkers as we have in the past they're the folks who patrol in yellow shirts bright yellow shirts you'll see them on bikes on the marketplace or on the bike path. In the parks as well. These are oftentimes students who are in between this who are offered summer during the college years. And they are not police officers they don't have enforcement power, nor do CSOs, but they do have the ability to be a presence for the municipality and to project that municipalities presence in a way that gives people an opportunity to ask questions. That gives the opportunity to see things that are happening and reported appropriately. They do carry radios. We also have private security, which is something that the city worked with last year. The extent of that is up for is determination right now is being determined right now. But last year we saw them in the parks we saw them on the marketplace we saw them here in city hall. And finally we have the community service liaison position which again is a new position that we invented as a component of our public safety continuity plan. It has been a tremendously effective and useful role. Basically what it does is it functions as a mental health detective, almost in the same way that patrol will take calls for service answer those calls address the call to the best of patrols ability and then say, if there's additional investigation or work that needs to be done it's going to have to be handed off to our detectives patrol also goes to issues that surround mental health, or substance use disorder, or and they say we are going to address the situation in front of us we're going to put a stop to the immediate concern, but what do we do next. That's a little bit beyond our needs and the radio is calling me for more jobs anyway. So who do I give this to I give this to our community support liaisons, and they refer it to the CSL's the CSL's therefore are both downstream and eventually they are upstream helpers as well because the more of those kinds of calls, we can service properly after a police intervention, the fewer of them become a police intervention again down the road. Street outreach, and I really I shouldn't be talking about this when the person who direct it and is the most expert in it is right behind us, but street outreach functions in a similar way to patrol in that it is out it picks up calls for service at times it also does a huge amount of proactive work, but they also do a certain amount of case management. This is definitely the urban park rangers and here to not my area to speak about this is definitely director white and her ability to articulate this new program brand new to the city that is going to have an impact on making certain that there is a municipal presence in the parks that represents an ability to to maintain a sense of order and safety. So I think with that I'll actually step down and let some of those others speak if the if it's time. All right, so we are incredibly excited about our new urban park ranger program. Neil Preston is our first Ranger he's three days on the job so no challenging questions for him at the end you can I'll help you with those. So the urban park ranger program, the whole goal of it is to provide on site leadership, expertise and education to our Burlington park spaces. The program will build meaningful relationships with our community partners, citizens and visitors. At its heart, these positions will help the city ensure our parks are welcoming to everybody, increasing the thoughtful and positive presence in our parks. Utilizing tools of education to help our visitors and residents understand our park system ordinances and expectations that everybody can enjoy our public spaces. We look forward to developing future programming within our school systems to broaden this knowledge that excuse me broaden this knowledge base so that all of our students know the plethora of wonderful parks and benefits we have to offer. Just a few details about the program so we will have to full time staff. Neil is our first one and we have another fellow Andrew that will be starting next week. It's overseen by the waterfront division Aaron is ahead of our waterfront division. She's also the Herbert master and allocating is the direct supervisor. Some of you may have met. Alla key has run our campground for many years now and that's actually where he is today. You'll see him out and about they'll have ebikes they'll be on the city vehicles and then we'll have up to about six seasonal staff in the summer, we'll be all working closely together we're all one city team. And so it's one where Neil has on the BPRW logo, but he'll also be in communication with CSO CSL to be in communication with the street outreach. We all talk together and that's one of the things that we'll get to when we get to events we're one city team here. And we all work together, even though I have the full logo. So that's a bit about our urban park ranger program and I'm going to hand it over I believe I'm handing it to car was going to go to the next events. Great. Yeah, that's fine. Hi, I'll kick us off just by saying I think it's, I think many of us know that when we program our public spaces it, it creates a sense of fun order security and it's welcoming to everyone. So, during this time we are very focused on making sure that we're back in full force this summer, welcoming tourists and local residents as well, and making sure there's fun activities for everyone out there in our public spaces. Some of these I'm going to leave to Doreen because I think some of these are BCA run events. Yeah, well with everybody's help because it really does take a village to bring this all together. And I just want to say that I really feel with this team that you have represented today that there is. We're going to be here in Burlington throwing out the red carpet and saying, welcome, welcome back. Welcome. Coming back from a very difficult time. We are here we are a community we're united. And we're going to create the best spring summer fall season that you've experienced in many, many years, and we're going to do it with a lot of joy and a lot of love, and a lot of creativity, because the one that Vermont has an overabundance of is that possible. No, is the creative economy, and so many individuals that are going to bring a very special meaning to Burlington. So we're going to do noontime concerts. There will be four of them throughout the summer. The splash pad if you haven't experienced the joy of screaming children and adults running through the splash pad, please join us. We're going to have parties twice a week with some of the best DJs in our land here to augment that fun. They'll be evening concerts called the Twilight series. Every other weekend Friday and Saturday night in the evening, really going to bring quite the lineup of some of the best bands in Vermont. Our flicks in the park so out to our movies, and during the jazz festival for example we're going to be running some films with full jazz accompaniment to old silent films, pretty special night. There's the spotlight the community spotlight which is a way that we have noontime conversations and afternoon conversations with artists in the community so that the community at large gets a chance to understand the process of creating and creating work. There's listen up, and then of course the major new addition this year, be TV market, which is an expanded artist market with makers and micro businesses and entrepreneurs and new BIPOC businesses that are just going to bring some of the special things that are created in this community. Many of them and most of them here in Burlington, so that they can be enjoyed by the larger community both our residents who come out and love this as well as our visitors in town. So that's a little bit of a taste of what's happening but you know, don't miss any day of the week they'll always be something happening in the park. I feel like it's a oops the wrong direction you got there. No, was it the right one. Thank you. I'm sorry, but I just want to say one thing is a little FOMO for me whenever I go away, because there's always so much fun happening at downtown that I'm always like we, I can't go away this weekend, but thanks. You can go away one weekend. I can. Okay. In order to reactivate the church tree marketplace we have revamped our cart vendor program. We've added mentors and a lot of new carts as part of our micro business incubator program you'll see lots of different food and retail options on the street. We have also added in minimum attendance requirements to ensure that the street is activated as frequently as possible. We have pop up food vendors in City Hall Park on the area that we call the college street terrace we did that last summer to a great success. And we're going to have live music with family games every Wednesday on the marketplace that'll be in front right around home for right in the middle block. And that's going to be a daytime activation for families we have always have our student entertainer program the buskers, and we're bringing back artists in the alley. As you may remember some of these programs were suspended or limited during our pandemic and we feel that bringing these back is really going to reactivate the core of our downtown. This is not loading. Oh, there we go. I'm going to. Oh, good. Thank you just do that. Thank you so much going on that we use the whole slide up. All right, so lots of great major events going on in Burlington this year, BPRW host some of those down on the waterfront. And then a lot many of them here City Hall Park and at Church Street marketplace, just calling out a few of them one of them that already happened. The kids stay on this past weekend. One of the days was at City Hall Park and it was just a great success ice cream sunshine 80 degree weather fountain going on a circus in the park it was hard not to have amazing day for our families. And next up is Vermont City Marathon down at Waterfront Park and runners going out throughout the city. So many of the pools that is quite the Burlington event and we're doing is pulled out all the stops with that one this year and we I think one of the things I noticed that was exciting. Is that we have Canada coming back so we'll have our farmers coming up from the north down to Burlington which we are not able to be able to do the past couple of years. On the full list there are lots of great events going on some new ones running with the bulls. I think Para gave us a little introduction to that one but that's a new one coming to us. International boat show that one is not to like leave September, but that is a international boat show that's coming to Burlington so that's new. There's always there's the Lake Champlain maritime festival they've had a stop this year, but the fall one is a national one voters will be coming from all over to Burlington for that event so you'll see just all kinds of unique classic antique boats in Burlington. But Juneteenth fireworks delight there we've got it all happening here in Burlington. So we just hope everybody comes down so many amazing events happening. For example, we've got the support of the mayor and the city council supporting those budgets to make these possible, the businesses that help sponsor them, and of course just all of us working together. It's one, you know, helping each other out whether it's the expertise of BCA and all they do for putting events on to our staff to try to help make sure those parks are ready for them and cars team help them from the business side so we again hope everybody comes to downtown Burlington and play with them. Well, let you handle the lead up the question. Excellent. Thank you. Great. So, since we got all the mics here I think we'll show people people in and out is necessarily happy to take any questions that there are about any aspect of this plan. And I think the idea of presence and maybe chief you can touch on this too. You know just from from talking with both students whatever story they say we want to see officers down if you want to be able to see that foot traffic again. I mean how important is it to have that presence and we talked about it time and time again, but now that you have this plan, how would work and will work. Having a public safety presence is important. And we struggled to provide that sufficiently last summer and the plan that we laid out here today is is intended to do just that is to have a stronger multifaceted presence, this new police deployment is part of that. So there should be a we're going to have as regular presence as we can with the current limitations of the department and we're going to augment that with all these other professionals going forward. That's, that's, you know, I was on the radio this morning and got some feedback on the radio that people already sense some positive difference and we're going to be working very hard to continue that and build that. Chief you want anything else about that. Sure. I think part of the question is, how can we do more with less. And that is sort of the picture we have if this was the model that we were working on for the past year essentially. It's six right this is predicated on six so is this, but it's a different mix of six we've lost officers, we are going to continue to lose officers for the rest of this calendar year at the least. Even if we are able to bring the board officers for our August police Academy which I am hopeful we will, but we will still lose a net number of officers owing to projected departures, 10 year related departures, etc. So we've instead beat up the number of CSOs we have so we go from six to this. What else changes the other thing that changes is where those are deployed. And frankly what we are doing is focusing on the center city area, which is where again history tells us more than 50% of our calls for service or our overall incidents occur in this area. We're putting resources specifically there in a way that this model did not. This model was about splitting the city about having equal numbers of officers in both halves of the city, and was an attempt to approximate this as best as we could, with much limited resources. So this is an effort to address the core part of the city, the city center area where we have been hearing from people that they have not felt the kinds of presence that they want to feel with regard to officers with regard to patrol. Now, a key to this model is that this is predicated on four officers being available for that shift. We don't have four officers available every shift. We have amazing officers, terrific officers, but they're human, they sometimes get ill they go sick. This one went and ran a half marathon in Antarctica. So we end up having people who are not always available for us at all times. Sometimes we don't have four. If we have three this plan is not able, and we will probably go back to this model on those days. What we're going to do is what is our call volume going to be this past weekend between three o'clock on Saturday afternoon and 4am on Sunday morning, we had 58 calls for service. 58 incidents that included gunfire incidents included shootings included stabbings included domestic assaults. It was a tremendously tremendously busy 14 hour period. If we have periods like that, then the ability for all these officers actually to be on the marketplace or actually even to be patrolling the north or the south as the Rover north and Rover south is tremendously limited, because they are eating up through that shift by the calls for service that they have to address. And while we normally stack about 13% of our calls we stack 17% of our calls during that very, very busy period on Saturday, because officers were extended. That is that they were they were overextended in their work. So those I think are answers to your questions. We are trying to do as best we can with what we've got. And I'm telling the officers that we need to make certain that we are are hearing our neighbors needs for service that we are calling upon ourselves to do what we can for our business partners for our neighbors for the people we serve. Hearing the mayor support on these issues is tremendously important for us and for the men and women inside the police department. We need to know that we've got the community support as well on these issues. Because, frankly, when we have fewer people available to us. It actually means that sometimes incidents don't go as well as we want them to go. A lot of our training is predicated on having enough officers sufficient numbers of officers to be able to handle the situation with multiple people doing multiple roles. That's a little bit stretched right now, but we're building other capacities in order to address that. And you see a number of them here, and you hear all the extra plans that are out there, beyond police about what makes this a strong community. A strong community is a strong community because it is a strong community it sounds like a tautology, but it's not. If there are people in the downtown there are people in the downtown, if we tell people to come and people come that alone makes a place safer, more secure, and reinforces that safety in an ever reinforcing circle. So we're hopeful that these kinds of events bring the right people into the downtown and make it in a place where we can actually feel like the community we want to be. Well, thank you for that chief. I guess I just want to add to that, you know, there's a couple numbers thrown out there that I think are important numbers for people to have in mind and, you know, the chief rightly wants to deliver on our commitments to the public and wants to doesn't want to over promise and what I think he just walked us all through is there. The way in which our system needs to work right now there will be times when this deployment that is shown here on the map will not be possible. That stacking figure that he cited at 1317% in that period last last weekend is a decent proxy for the amount of time where we will struggle to deliver on this model and struggle to deliver this type of presence so the public. You know, I think what's important and I share the chiefs. There will be moments there will be times the public comes down and they they're not going to see it see exactly this and that's one of the reasons is that there will be times that events around the city or require a different response. All that said, if if we deliver on this model 80% of the time. I think that is people are going to feel a marked improvement over last summer when you add to that this big array of new new resources, new professionals. I'm confident that like we said earlier, the city is going to feel open and welcoming again, and we look forward to seeing everyone back downtown this year. I was wondering. I know that you've been you're talking about you've been said a way to kind of add a more space to adapt but don't events like the marathon the fireworks also require more staffing. You want to speak to that chief I mean it does take different states of posture. They do require different kinds of staffing. So the marathon is in a different route this year, and it's actually going to require fewer police officers because it is not using as many roadways. And as a result it doesn't have to have as many police officers controlling intersections. By Vermont law, a lighted intersection has to be controlled by a police officer, whereas other kinds of intersections stop signs etc can be controlled by volunteers even. We do use our community service officers. We have used other employees to do non lighted intersections. The marathon's route change means that we're going to be able to service that with with fewer officers than we have in the past, but we also routinely bring in outside agency officers for that event actually outside agencies love to sign up for that event because it's a wonderful day. And it's terrific crowds and generally is a really fun time. That is a little different. That has always been a Burlington Police Department purview and dealing with the numbers of people that we have coming into the city has always been Burlington's task. We do not use outside agencies for that with the exception of a handful of UVM officers or South Burlington officers up at the jug handle, or on the campus where the buses depart. We usually get assistance from our partners at the Vermont State Police very very grateful for that with regard to their tactical units that will be in the waterfront area, but the bulk of the policing that is at the major areas of the waterfront Oakledge Beach at North Beach, and then the traffic out after the event which is the biggest issue has always been done by Burlington Police. We are going to be very differently staffed for that this year, and we are not staffed nearly the way we have been in the past. So last year it function and last year was a smaller than normal July 3. If this is a fully sized July 3. We're going to have some changes on where parking and outflow traffic happen. Sure. So we didn't we have not changed our shift structure our shift structure remains a three shift structure. We have a day shift that essentially goes from 745 730 until 1730. We have a evening shift that goes from 1645 to 0245. And then we have a midnight shift that goes from 1015 until 815. So the midnight shift does not have four officers has to that model looks more like this except that it's really just it is a coverage of the entire city. There's not even a cover north cover south. Especially where you have the incident that we've seen this last weekend during that kind of late hours. I mean having to pull guys in guys and yowls in and then to do that and how how much of a struggle is not going to be kind of moving towards this, this model as well. Well, it's a struggle with moving towards this model or just a struggle in general. I mean, especially where you have to bulk up your, you know, your gunfire incidents happening in the early morning hours or the stabbing tapping late at night. I mean, when you think it might help address that issue in terms of that that time of the day. I mean, kind of what what should folks expect. As it turned out the fact that we'd had a stabbing around two in the morning was a good thing because then we had enough officers on hand for the 4am shooting. And we had not sent them home at the shift end and had not and had actually called some in as well to assist. So we really wouldn't have had the same kinds of resources for that 4am gunfire shooting incident. You know, we're going to deal with this as we deal with it. And on some level this is something that we've always had to experience it's just been of a different scope and scale. So it is always possible that some sort of cataclysmic event could happen and overwhelm even a fully staffed police department. And you have to do with what you can with what you've got. We simply are in a different kind of position right now with regard to staffing. But as you know in my in my history as a police officer I've been at multiple major events including the Boston Marathon bombing the Chelsea bombing in New York City. Those are events that that frankly can overwhelm even fully staffed agencies, and you deal with what you can deal with and you function in the way you can. We're going to be doing that a little more often than perhaps we would like, but we will be doing it to the best of our ability and with the best ability and the best to give that the men and women inside the Berlin to police department have 66 on the books 57 effective 57 who are available for patrol at this moment. A year ago, we were at, I wouldn't know the exact data year ago the exact year ago but I believe we were in the low 80s a year ago. Yes. No, not exactly. It would be prognostication percentages low, but the number of calls for service that are of a higher priority is disproportionate and goes up. But I don't have the exact figures, it was a component of a heat map that we published when we talked about the possibility of not having a midnight shift. It is a good deal. It certainly does. There are fewer incidents at that time but many of those incidents become more significant. Mostly because quality of life incidents require somebody awake to be bothered by the kind of incident that it is somebody's, you know, too noisy or something's happening and people are asleep, then those kinds of quality of life. Those kind of quality of life incidents are not noticed, but big ones are. Yeah, so the potential for the types of incidents that may be a CSO or a CSL. That is correct. That's correct. I want to speak that for the chief. I mean there has been some success with recruitment, but it's slow and. So, obviously, we were incredibly grateful for the city council's partial reversal of the decision in June of 2020 and moving to headcount of 87. What we have been able to do is hire again and start hiring and at least being able to even able to advertise. Facing is a challenge that has been something facing the entire state and in fact the entire country and the profession of policing around the United States. There are not a lot of folks who are trying to come into this profession right now. We have brought aboard a total of three people since the decision was made by the council to allow us to hire again. All of those one did not complete one is in the academy and one is in his field training on the streets right now. I have high hopes for both of those two officers the one who's in field training exemplary officer was a former member of the street outreach team. So we know that that person has experience and a certain philosophy of interaction that is something we value and want. And the one who's currently in the police academy also somebody for whom I have a lot of hopes. We're working to hire and my training officer excuse me my recruitment officer has a lot of plans put together an advertisement that we did on WCAX is working hard at making sure that we keep up with candidates and ways that we haven't in the past. We're proactive about really engaging with them trying to bring them in and not lose them and let them wriggle off the hook as it were. But ultimately what we need is we need a system that allows us to compete directly with our local peers and ultimately with regional peers as well in order to bring people into the profession, not as recruits but as what we call lateral police officers people who are already certified police officers elsewhere in Vermont or in other states, who can be brought aboard in a somewhat quicker fashion and be officers on the street faster than a recruit who has to go through the police academy. To do that, we need to change our narrative we need to be able to tell our story and be able to really connect with the people who we hope to make members of this team. I want to add to that real quick. The, so the chief described that this rebuilding plan has begun we are doing some new things we haven't done before like these television advertising on this coming Monday, the chief is going to be laying out the budget proposal for the council for the next year and as part of that will be laying out a kind of the next stage that a robust rebuilding plan that will be resourced and that will involve a number of additional new initiatives to retain and recruit both new officers and lateral so it's really will be ready really focusing on that on Monday and but it's it's a key part of this related effort. So what you're describing is actually a miss reading of. And that was a long article that I believe misrepresented what we had communicated, which was that we were in this model, we were no longer in an area model we were in this cover north cover south model that's shown here. And the, the move from an area based model this one to this one was predicated on the number of officers available. And that in itself is not a contractual issue shifts are contractual issue when officers pick their time to work as a contractual issue, how they are assigned in order to and deployed throughout the city is a day to day operational decision. And what we had at that time was a system that was largely moving north south because we had already dropped below the numbers available for a true area based model. And what the question at hand was how many officers were available at a given time in the downtown area. And again, because we were splitting north south. That was not a relevant question it was the wrong question about whether or not we were in D area, we weren't in any areas at that point we were splitting the city north south, which we have been doing for the past year. And this is a change with regard to saying that we are now going to have a city center area, but one that then creates a little bit of changing the amount of service in the north and the south for the center core. The idea of north south was a more evenly distributed amount of service across the city, but that's one that we are seeing that we need to really focus in on this downtown center area instead. Yes, that's a that's a determination that would be made by the officer in charge on a given shift. So there's only three of us today. Somebody's running a half marathon in Antarctica. And so we're going to be doing north south. And maybe we don't even do north south if there's only three maybe we do coverage across the whole city. That's going to be a determination made by an OIC based on how many resources. And there's also the question of whether or not somebody's going to be coming in partway through the shift at noon. But there's some other things in the works as well for us to try to maximize the resources that we have. And hopefully the answer to your question is it's a determination by the officer in charge. So the number of gunfire incidents, I believe is eight. I think that that is the number that we are at all. But I might have to get back to you on that one. There was a, what is morale, you know, morale inside the department is is a tough question I think that there are different kinds of morale, there's internal morale and then there is sort of extra morale. Of how do I work with my coworkers how do I feel about the mission I have how do I feel about this work. Actually, I think it's pretty high right now I think there is a sense of camaraderie and teamwork inside the agency that is laudable, and is a testament to the men and women and the degree to which they want to serve this community they are your officers they're our police officers. With regard to other kinds of morale, how they feel with regard to exhaustion with regard to working more over time than we historically have seen before. With regard to feeling that they're not entirely staffed the way they want with regard to feeling that they can't deliver on the way on the kinds of policing that they historically have delivered and want to deliver. I think you have a different kind of picture, and nobody wants to feel that they are less than their best. No one wants to feel that, you know, they are not delivering what they are trained or empowered or accustomed to delivering. And that definitely can have an impact. I'm not up in the air reason I felt urgency to make a decision at the end of a long search process to to have the stability of having a chief that would be able to do exactly what we're talking about today rolled out of plans that are the function of many months of planning and collaboration and discussion. I think initiatives that's very hard for. I think it's challenging for an acting chief to do with a uncertain timeline. You've seen this plan today this rebuilding plan is coming out in days to come. You're going to see next week. Data reports, statistical report being issued that the chief has has supported as well. All of that, I think we're far better place today to be able to do this work roll out these initiatives make forward progress, because we have stability in the chief position. It is, I think we, you know, clearly you're referring to the fact that that that confirmation the chief resulted in a six, six council split. And, you know, it is something I still have some ongoing conversation with counselors about and hope that so I think would be better for you to get to a place where there's this full confirmation, but we're already in a better position for during the extended period without clarity about leadership. In terms of how involved for businesses or how much input. I mean we've heard a lot from business owners over the last year plus that about concern and about a sense that the city needed to do more and we also heard that from residents we also heard that from visitors and what we've been communicating today as a response to that and then and our commitment to take action and to deliver people the type of safe inclusive welcoming downtown for all that that. Yes, our businesses but also the public and visitors expect. It was May 1 basically May 1 is when the way that police officer tours. As they refer to them work. There's a new deployment that is is sorted out every. Every three three month period that yes sir. It's four months there are three four month tours in a year and officers are assigned. They bid on that based on seniority and decide whether or not they want to be on the evening shift or on the midnight shift. I think your question actually goes back to last year in May, and essentially, if you look at the article that I believe you're referring to it actually mentions that we were in north south posture then it just varies it at the bottom of the article. We were in a north south posture by May of 2021. And we've been in this one, which is this since that point. Officers did still have areas in that that is a roster and those area, those officers have areas assigned in their roster, but they were running north south almost every single shift. And it was a matter of saying that we can't have that we didn't have enough for specific areas. As a result we were covering in order to, in order to maximize coverage across the entirety of the city. We moved to a north south model, rather than saying that tonight we're just not going to have anybody in C or anybody in a. Instead we said we're going to split the city and have north and south and if we had six on it was three and three if we had five it was maybe two and one and three and the other. If we had seven or eight and sometimes we would go back to that area model. And there's some shifts where you have both sides of a shift in at the same time and therefore you were big enough that you could have the area model. But it was, it was in great flux. And basically every single shift was was an uncertainty was uncertain how many have, which is the same as it's been. We were doing firearms training for most of April and as a result we never had what we would call a double day. There were most days we were running three on a shift instead of four. So, the, the ways in which assignments happen in those instances are not as simple as looking at a sheet. They're a day to day decision that has to do with what you've got, and whether or not you have certain conditions that are rising and in this part of the city or in that part of the city, and where are you going to put your resources. That is correct. In the midnight shift we have two officers. There are two extra I'm sorry I think it may be three on on one side of ship. Have fewer at the daytime then everything is it just everything is a decision to Rob Peter to pay Paul at this point. It would be it would be a matter of rebidding. We would probably be able to do it and it might be a grievance but that would be it might be a contractual issue. For the most part, there'd have to be a specific reason to say we don't need as many on the day as we need on the midnight. The data tells us that the midnights are the slowest period of time. And therefore that's when that we staff based on volume. I think that's a key point this but this represents what this map represents what we've been trying to communicate to today is a prioritization of staffing using our limited resources to staff daytime hours daytime shifts and to focus them to a degree that has not been the case until now on the downtown center city area where we have a disproportionate number of of incidents this is a data oriented approach this is essentially this that rectangle there more or less rectangle is within that area is what where more than 50% of the incidents over the course of a year take place and we're dedicating half of our officers and centering these these additional CSOs in that area and supplementing that with the other the other initiatives that we talked about today. Again, we've, we've been in this posture this new posture since May 1 there's some early indications from conversations I've had with downtown stakeholders that differences being felt, and we are very committed to working on this and and have this be a success. It is essential from, from my perspective for Burlington to continue to be what it's always been, we have to be a place that feels safe and welcoming to everyone, and this new posture and all these other resources and initiatives is is how is how we're going to achieve that. Appreciate you all being here and being with us for a long time, and we'll talk to you all again soon. Thank you.