 Good evening. I'm Austin Davis the director of government affairs with the Lake Champlain Chamber, and you're watching live at 525 We like to take over once in a while here. That's the Lake Champlain Chamber and host this segment and Use it as an opportunity to bring in a community leader or someone working on something interesting in our region to talk about You know how it affects our business community our our economy and our collective prosperity prosperity The Lake Champlain Chamber is one of the largest chambers in the state and we serve the greater Burlington area and With me tonight. I've I've got chief Tom Burke from the South Burlington Police South Burlington Police Department and we're just wanted to talk a little bit about some public safety issues and the You know some of the concerns that folks have had around the community That are manifesting themselves in some legislative action potentially in Montpelier and you'll be in Montpelier on Friday to testify as I Seemed to recall. Yes. Hello So by way of an attraction might you tell us a little bit about yourself? Sure. So my name is Sean Burke I've served in Vermont law enforcement for the last 30 years I started my career with the Woodstock Vermont Police Department served there for two years before I transitioned to The Burlington Police Department where I served 21 years and now since 2018. I've had the Great fortune to serve as the police chief in the city of South Burlington That's Certainly a long career in law enforcement. You've seen multiple eras of law enforcement I guess tell me a little bit if there's much difference between being serving in Burlington and serving in South Burlington You know, it's a smaller force and you've got a kind of different community Yeah, certainly so South Burlington historically has been a suburban city. Of course that landscape is changing which is fantastic We're actually developing an urban center in our in on Market Street downtown And we have a plethora of housing opportunities that have gone up and that are scheduled to go up in 2024 so it's it's really opportunistic for me because having served in Burlington the you know Vermont's actual big city if you will to see how South Burlington is evolving that way and you also have to evolve police operations in that way Yeah, a new downtown core kind of means a whole new type of patrol different type of way of doing business and I Personally live in Wanooski and we always call ourselves Vermont's Opportunity City And it's when you look over at South Burlington and everything growing and changing and the new employers coming in there Suddenly feels like they're trying to take that title sometimes it's a really vibrant community and you know We're fortunate to have a fantastic city council great leader in our city manager and the vibrancy is is red on par Yeah, city manager that you did take from Wanooski We try our best to forgive you So tell me a little bit about some of what you're seeing in South Burlington, you know, especially with these changes some some of the changes in You know violations of the law community policing what what it's happening Yeah, there's a few things that I've actually come home the roost in South Burlington Now that we do have a little more urban grit and what we're seeing are obviously the symptoms of substance use disorder We have a number of untreated unhoused folks that are living in parking lots living in their vehicles And that's disheartening on many levels. It's also An area where we're seeing a great deal of retail theft Occurring from our large retail sectors both on Dorset Street and along the Shelburne Road Corridor, we're also seeing the acute mental health crisis in this state and the fact that the systems of care are simply Overwhelmed and we are having to try to help those neighbors that are suffering and guide them back unfortunately, the answer always seems to be the hospital and The hospital is you know, not well equipped to deal with the volume of folks that are in crisis in the community So those things come, you know front of mind Ways in which South Burlington is Building capacity or has built capacity historically. We are home to the methadone clinic The Chittinac clinic located on San Remo Drive that clinic serves a thousand remoners through Methadone treatment and it quietly sits there And I like to point that out to folks that are a little fearful of what drug treatment looks like and We work closely with their security staff on whatever issues may crop up in that area And also some of the housing opportunities that have been developed most recently braver in apartments is now occupied So we're seeing people transition into Into those homes now, but of course, you know, not everyone is ready for treatment or housing and there is at times an instability and Unfortunately because of the overwhelming systems of the overwhelmed systems of care The police are often called especially after hours to come and deal with whatever the problem is. Yeah No, it's an interesting dynamic where you know for There's been over the last few years a large discussion around how people don't want to be calling the place for everything How there might be need to push policing actions to other places But at the same time it feels like more and more just getting piled on the police as other systems are kind of failing and Crumbling or insufficient to to handle all the need that's out there. Yeah, certainly. I mean, we do have help in that regard We do have we're one of the subscribing communities to the community outreach team So through the designated agency Howard, we do have that capacity right now It's Monday through Friday essentially business hours less than clinicians that will either do a co-response Or will respond on their own to kind of take apart some of these mental health crises But oftentimes the level of danger the person is presenting is either You know very apparent or unknown and that usually does trigger rightfully so a co-response So what do you say is contributing at most to this? I mean, we're coming out of global pandemic We've seen new substances find their way into our communities There's housing crisis. I mean, what else is comes into these contributing factors or those are the main ones So those are the big drivers right now. So poverty You know folks that are living in the community whether with a formal diagnosis of mental health or that are just situationally in crisis substance use disorder that's Not being met with treatment or the person is treatment resistant Those are really our top drivers and of course, there's you know a perception of around folks that are houseless and You know just because you're asleep in a car in a parking lot Doesn't mean that you're suffering an overdose doesn't mean that you're there to commit a crime But the community doesn't quite know how to reconcile that and I feel as though that You know that we desperately need to figure out, you know If these folks were living in congregate housing before the pandemic Do we need to figure out how to do Congregate housing better now in order to avoid the problem having folks sleep in public spots Yeah, this is something that we had at the late chamber was engaged with in the legislative session last year there was a conversation about a homeless bill of rights and That this will actually resume this session but there was this vague language around activities associated with homelessness and You know one thing we kept bringing up was what is that? because that is very broad and it depends on who you ask what those activities are and You know a lot of the perception in the community Unfortunately associates many negative and sometimes criminal acts towards just being homelessness and Many of the folks who are struggling with homelessness are just that they're in such a struggle that they're not causing a lot of harm to the rest of the Community they're very much focused on themselves and getting by and so you don't want that just kind of blanket You know vague term applying to anyone's perception and so Yeah, it's interesting that you speak that I speak about that and it does point to just you know housing being one of the Foundational issues in our communities. I can't agree more. Yeah So you're speaking of housing I mean I talked to employers all the time in our community and I talked to them about staffing and housing is one of the Biggest components that's holding back staffing for them. I've got to assume you're facing the same thing What was your staffing like? Yeah, so across the country police The police profession is suffering and locally here in South Burlington. We currently have 34 police officers employed We're authorized to have 40 police officers and what that really means in terms of service delivery Delivery is we have our officers Allotted generally to patrol and we do not have as many officers in special assignments like detectives the drug task force or in our school resource officer positions simply because we don't have them and the applicants for police officers are not plentiful right now and what we saw through 2020 and 2022 is that officers that were eligible for retirement? They did so and With that you lose decades of experience and it's great You know to hire a bunch of new officers and send them off to Pittsburgh twice a year But they have no experience when they go and it's going to be you know 17 weeks at the police academy is the standard there and then once they come back to us It's another 15 weeks of field training before they can go on a single radio call by themselves And you can't compromise on that because that then you're putting people potentially in danger. That's right so tell me actually talked to me a little bit about Pittsburgh and the Residential Academy this is something that I was At a lunch set of breakfast that the Burlington mayor put on and when new ski mayor put on a little while ago And they call this out as an impediment to getting community members engaged in the police force Is it something you're feeling South Burlington to? Yeah, I think the profession in general the Residential Academy is a great fit for a lot of people So when I think about the 22 year old Sean Burke in 1994 I was served well by the Residential Academy when we think about Other more diverse candidates whether they're a little bit older their parents They have different things going on in their lives It makes sense that we figure out a path forward to an alternative model but what we can't do is slow the pipeline now and You know the thing about the Academy is it's really tremendously under resourced in terms of staff there And they rely on our practitioners to serve as the instructors I just got the report today South Burlington police instructors spent 303 hours this year instructing across all the curriculum there And that's work. We have to do in order to produce police officers. So in order to change Our posture or our model is going to take a lot of strategic thought and I think as a hiring agency With both options on the table, you're gonna have to think about what your recruit officer is best served by So there's gonna have to be a level of being judicious and saying well This person's got all this career life experience Maybe and can't go stay somewhere for a number of months We're gonna find another alternative path to get them in a place for us. Yeah, that would be the you know The perfect solution. Gotcha. Gotcha What else is I mean, obviously there's been some some a lot of community discussion and soul-searching over Policing that's made the profession a little bit You know non-advantageous looking to new recruits. What else is serving as an impediment? I think The next thing that's really close is the lack of accountability in the system right now Officers tell me on a daily basis how demoralizing it is to go out and arrest the same recidivists over and over again for You know what what are minor misdemeanor crimes, but actually caught really? You know hard at the fabric of the community both in terms of economic vitality and also public safety So I know we like to point to low vialing crime rates across the country now And that there shouldn't be this sense of we're not safe But if you've lived in a neighborhood for 20 years and your car has never been Broken into or ransacked in the middle of the night or your packages have never been stolen and suddenly that's going on That makes you feel unsafe. Yeah in the space that that is yours So we need to take that serious And in terms of you know what the officers are facing with recidivists We really need some policy changes around what it means when you've been arrested For a crime, you know misdemeanor from minor misdemeanor crime and you've been given court conditions imposed court conditions and What does it mean when you violate those conditions because right now? There's no teeth in that dog. Yeah, let's I wanted to tell you a little bit about that So let's talk about explain conditions are released to me. This is something that's Kind of on the docket in Montpelier. Folks are interested in this. It's kind of folks are starting to Feel their way towards this as being the cause of a lot of our recidivism so an individual they get arrested they need to get arraigned they go before a judge and At this point a state's attorney or deputy state's attorney They're gonna ask the judge for our conditions release. Is that right? Yeah So it you know, there's statutory framework around here to your point about the legislatures The legislative session coming up once the judge has found probable cause There is then this analysis done a risk-of-flight analysis Generally cash bail is really held for those that have been charged with a crime of violence Other folks that might get bail are ones that have not been responsive to prior Engagements with the court that we call it a history of failure to appear But what we've seen grow especially with the court backlog is Defendants who are racking up countless misdemeanors. So let's we'll use retail theft as an example They are committing retail theft on a weekly basis. They've been arraigned They have conditions of release to say that in many cases don't commit new crimes Don't return back to the place that you had stolen from and that's racked with the victims of that crime Exactly whatever the court feels are reasonable, you know to keep the community safe and to ensure future appearances of Of this defendant and time and time again What we're seeing is blatant disregard by the defendants for those conditions are released They're getting arraigned on new charges and then put back out on either amended Conditions or very consistent conditions that they have chronically violated and so either I feel like the classic Hollywood law and order kind of view of bail is you know You put the bail in there to keep the person in and jail So they can't commit more crimes or they can't do things but in Vermont that the language is pretty specific It's it's flight risk and a lot of these folks aren't gonna flee their community or try to flee justice They're just gonna make more trouble in their community and that's kind of in a gray area. That's what you're saying Yeah, it certainly is and you know, I think it's probably an area where You know flight from prosecution should be part, you know Failure to abide by conditions of release should be the part of the calculus on a flight risk because you're you're avoiding prosecution essentially because you know you're not gonna be prosecuted and I don't think the answer is Necessarily like throwing everyone in jail. It's not really long and cursive sentences But there has to be really expedient intervention by the court in order to deter the criminal behavior So, you know the calculus on the defendant side of this is am I gonna get caught? And if I do what's actually gonna happen to me? Well, yeah, and so that's something that folks are pointing in a lot, too It's just that the inevitability of consequences or how rapidly the consequences has come and with our court backlog It is quite a long time. I was talking to someone who's a board was in a conversation with someone Who's a former state trooper and they're saying that they're they're actually dealing with 2018 DUI cases still like that are going through the court system. So Long delayed and you know, if you're committing some kind of crime saying well They're not gonna get to me anytime soon doesn't seem to be immediate consequences to actions Nothing incentivizes the person to not Go out and do those actions again, correct? Yeah, absolutely And those that are justice-involved they totally know because of the backlog on the trial docket those serious crimes of violence felonies DUIs Those are going to be heard at trial well before their cases and the longer they can The longer they can delay that time they the plea deal is just gonna get better They're near the trial space. I'm never gonna go for them wholesale rate It's a great example if you can just kind of keep and in keeping underneath that threshold of what is a serious crime Right, that'd be correct. Yeah, so the delineation really is a crime of violence Yeah So which there's a lot of logic as to why you would impose bail in those cases But there has to be a better solution for these what are considered minor misdemeanor crimes But we have recidivists that are just ravaging particularly our retail community Yeah, I'll say retail theft is kind of one of those those types of crimes where if you know if you stay at a certain level You can then kind of continue on these and I Was wondering if you could talk a little bit more because you have a quite a retail Community in South Burlington and they're experiencing this. Yeah, it's certainly and you know just as an example We Responded to just under 500 reported incidents of retail theft in 2023. We're still distilling that data and you know back when I first became a police officer the felony threshold for retail theft was a $100 even then that struck me is too low so over the years it was changed to $900 to match that of Grand larceny versus misdemeanor larceny and that just seems to be too high and When we think about the defendant's calculus about am I going to be caught and what's going to be hap what's gonna happen to me? potentially if that threshold was were lower not to a hundred dollars, but somewhere else and The conduct was actually a felony that would allow the police to make an arrest in that moment for that crime And I believed that that potentially could have a deterrent effect Where's right now? They're just citing the individual if if they're talking to them at all Certainly in a lot of cases and then you're depending on the relationship with your lost prevention Community a lot of these are late report. So lost prevention will have found the footage of You know 12 tool kits being stolen and provided to us and then Inevitably, we know who they actor is and then we have to track them down and cite them in the court Yeah, and so You know, I think that gets out another thing Which is I think that there's there's a quite a fatigue on a reporting fatigue You know so you mentioned kind of numbers Being that and just immediately go. Oh, I feel like I've heard almost as many reports myself That doesn't feel right. Do you feel like there's a reporting fatigue around some of these like lower level property? Misdemeanor crimes within our communities. Yeah, certainly in the retail space I mean some corporations have a policy of not intervening with retail theft and not reporting So that those numbers aren't even in the calculus a lot of our High-drivers are entity, you know businesses that have dedicated lost prevention. So they're actually out doing the work and apprehent making apprehensions But I think retail theft in general is greatly underreported as is like larceny from a motor vehicle You know you go out you realize that you left your car unlocked your car was rummaged through Maybe something was taken. Maybe not not everyone's calling the police in those instances. Yeah, or they're finding out too late I had a friend who recently Had their unfortunate situation with the left their car unlocked and had a checkbook stolen Took him a few weeks to learn that that was still and they thought it was in the glove box And it was quite a lot of work after that when they had made that realization Yeah, so I mean what can what can community members do? I mean, I know that there's there's a lot of You know, you're ramping up your efforts on the police front legislators are Re-evaluating some of these thresholds they're talking about potentially Adding up misdemeanor offenses related to retail theft to make them a felony What can your normal folks on the street do yeah, so in two different spheres So at home in in your neighborhood if you own a car, please lock it and take your keys Do not leave valuables in your car whether you're in your driveway or a shopping center We could cut the number of thefts from motor vehicles dramatically if folks would do that Likewise with the trend that we've seen with stolen cars a Vast majority of our stolen car reports are unlocked with the keys left in them Vermont We used to be able to do those things and no longer And so that could be of great help and when we talk with our partners in the retail space You customer service, of course, it's hard to hire anyone right now with the workforce crisis But great customer service is one of the best deterrents to retail theft You know if you can have an employee on the floor that says how about I hold that while you finish your shopping Or is there something that can help you find? We know that the suspects don't like to be in contact with the actual employees of the store as well as Thinking really strategically about how you set up your store and not having high-value items near exit points it not having multiple exit points if that's a possibility and Also the use of you know security cameras and other things that we know Particularly with this recidivist population They're looking for when they're kind of staking their claim as to where they're going to commit their criminal acts So what I mean, we're coming up on the end of our time here But what else do you see as needed in terms of you know, just overall kind of system change to kind of Turn the tide on what we're feeling. I think there's some Debate still around whether our current issues of public safety are more perception or not I'm in the camp of it's definitely not perception. I would say that even if it was Just perception perception is important too But what do you feel like needs to be done to turn the tide? We need to double down on the mental health crisis, you know we have to figure out what's going on and get left a boom on this issue and It's really tragic to see how some folks are suffering in our community and as Vermonters We just need to do better and in a similar way housing People find more success. They have more stability in their life when they're housed Yeah housing is a just I recommend anyone who's watching we had a great conversation with Norse West Vermont Realtors Association a few weeks ago just talked about how We're just not keeping up with the like we're not growing our housing stock Even close to the rate at which housing is coming offline because we do have the second-old housing stock in the country And so people a lot of times forget they take this We don't want to grow mindset and to not grow housing stock is to actually be content with losing housing stock each year and unfortunately Our population will I would be fortunate if they grew but our population isn't is continually growing too so it's crowding folks out and You know we at the lake chamber had a memo that a white paper we sent out with a number of organizations and We identified housing as one of the big components of our Current you know public safety crisis and one thing we kept Noting is that it's not just the individuals who are struggling with homelessness it's those who are responding and assisting the individuals who are struggling with homelessness if police officers and EMS workers and doctors and nurses and Folks at the designated agencies like the Howard Center Can't find staff because they can't find housing or those individuals are housing and secure Makes it really hard for them to hope folks who are very hard to house get into housing too and that is you know really why the Lake Champlain chambers completely focused this legislative session almost entirely on Housing and public safety are dual crises in the state No, it's fantastic. There are there is no South Burlington Cop firefighter or Howard community outreach worker that could go out on their salary and buy a home in our community And even if they can rent a place, it's generally a couple of them Spending some time as roommates for a number of years before they can save up a little bit money for the American dream And as much as I know you'd like to go and advocate for a budget that gets on the salary That's not reasonable either. I think there was a great piece that said Not long ago that you know your average salary depth increased about 55% in order to afford most housing That's on the market these days You know we need to invest in that place as well as investing in our mental health and other services that we have in the state Well, we're coming up on the last couple minutes any parting thoughts or no, I appreciate you having me in I think you know what we're seeing on the street is really a combination of a crisis involving substance use disorder mental health and poverty and I want all South Burlington residents to know that their police department is responding to every incident in person Providing the best possible police service we can despite our staffing challenges. Well, if you're interested in more We just had the South Burlington Police Department Website up on the screen and you can always learn more about the Lake Champlain Chamber and our efforts at just lccvermont.org and Feel free to reach out to either of us with questions comments concerns about this these crises that we're dealing with as a state and hopefully over the next Four-ish months. We'll see some substantive action in Montpelier some investments in this Health and service infrastructure some investments in our housing that will hopefully start to turn the tide It won't happen overnight. We didn't get here overnight But we can start making the right Right choices taking the right steps to turn it around. So thank you for coming on chief. Appreciate it. Happy New Year. Happy New Year