 So she just texted me back. She said, she said, okay, uh, to, uh, the link may be sent out. So I assumed she'll be joining us momentarily. Let's see here. A lot of people in public forum. We have a quorum and we're all here. Uh, Milo hopefully will be joining us shortly. Um, so I'm going to call this meeting to order. Um, we have a quorum here. We have five commissioners, uh, three chiefs and our commissioner Landon. So we've gone to additions and modifications of the agenda. Do I have a motion to adopt the agenda as is, uh, like Randall mixed emotions, seconded by anybody seconded by Karen all in favor, say I raise your hand. All right. Passes unanimously. Um, moving on to agenda item 2.01, which is the public forum. Um, uh, before I let Shannon take it away. Um, Shannon has a list of, um, names, people that are going to speak off. If anybody wants to raise a hand during public forum to ask a question, they're welcome to do so. And with that, Shannon, take it away, please. I did only have one request that came in a day or two ago from Jean and she, um, emailed me here just a little bit ago with drawing her request and said that she's going to email, um, the comment. And so I will, as soon as it's received, um, distribute it and post it for everyone. Awesome. Thank you for that. Um, if anybody in up, I see Milo now in the attendees. If anybody who's in attendance would like to speak during public forum right now, please raise your hand. Not seeing any. So that'll conclude the public forum, uh, portion of our meeting. And moving on to agenda item 3.01, uh, BPD staffing discussion. Um, I was, uh, so yeah, we'll start this off then. Um, I didn't know if the chiefs wanted to start off with the president, with the updated, uh, presentation of our current staffing situation and all. Sorry about that. Thank you, uh, Mr. Chair. Um, and yes, I do have a presentation. It's one that was shared with all of you last week. I believe it's been posted to the public for it to be seen. The one that I'm going to share with you is slightly different in places merely because frankly, our staffing is in, in flux in real time. And so the one that was shared with you is what was shared with the city council back in December. It is substantively the same. This one will be posted as soon as, as we're done. But I spent the afternoon trying to get this up to date, according to the newest information that we have, which, excuse me, includes, pardon me, includes recent departures. So with permission, I will share my screen. Yes, please stay. Thank you. Um, again, so this is an updated version of something that we shared with the city council, uh, in December, it has been updated to reflect some additional movements that we've had and it has been updated, uh, to, to be a little bit more precise about some of the departures and what constitutes a departure or an ineffective. Um, to start with, uh, we, we go back to June and to the racial justice through economic and criminal justice resolution. And among its many prescriptions was a requirement that the department be allowed to diminish through attrition. And that was a, uh, it was certainly preferable at the time to me to actually decreasing by 30% through layoffs. Those layoffs would have entailed, uh, losing our newest, most recently hired officers. Those are our most diverse officers. Our, I think officers most reflective of changes in hiring patterns that were implemented by recent chiefs. But fortunately, we didn't have to do that. So the, that that, while that was certainly something that was of great concern in June, the idea of immediately, immediate layoffs, we were, uh, brought instead to a position of attrition. And attrition seemed to be a better cause, but we have a tritted faster, perhaps than many people presumed. We talked about some of these possibilities, even during the summer, what this staffing presentation is going to lay out. But they're happening more rapidly than we thought. And what our concern is, is that there is at some point a tipping point, um, to borrow the phrase that actually comes from policing. It is a phrase that refers to the drastic crime decline in New York City and was taken by, uh, Malcolm Gladwell as the title for his book because of that moment in New York, where certain new techniques for accountability in policing led to drastic, drastic crime, crime declines that, uh, became self reinforcing. Before we discuss the staffing, I want to discuss recruiting and hiring because we can't understand staffing without understanding hiring and recruiting. The process is a long one. We are unlike many, many other parts of the city with the possible exception of the fire department in that when we have an opening for an employee, we cannot merely advertise, get some applicants and then bring those applicants immediately into the department in order to begin working. It is a much longer process for us. And that's a good thing. We want that. We want to have a very restrictive and strict process that is ensuring that we are getting the best possible candidates, but that requires time. And that time is further complicated by the availability of only two Vermont police academies in a specific year and all officers to become level three certified officers in the state of Vermont must go through the Vermont police academy. In general, our training process is, uh, is, is outlined here. It's about six months for pre-academy work. It's about eight months. Once you get into the academy and then move through to field training. And therefore the total time for an officer from application, from start to solo, being on the road alone and being an officer capable of answering calls is about 14 months. And that's a, that's a good scenario. We could probably shave it a little bit, maybe a month here or there. We really can't get it much better than that. And it in many cases is even longer. Again, this is also dictated by the availability of the Vermont police academy. And the next issue is that our standards are very high as they should be for our city. In our last class, we had about 260 applicants. Six of those were ultimately hired and sent to the Vermont police academy. Only three graduated. So even when we are able to get applicants in, the academy process is difficult. It's difficult to live far away from home, down in, uh, you know, the center part of Vermont in an isolated area, only going home on weekends. It's a, it's an arduous process to get through a police academy. Once we're done with that, we have 14 weeks plus of field training, which is by far the longest in the state. And we're rigorous about that. Deputy Chief LeBreck, who's on this call is, is in charge of that. We have a very, very robust field training process. Again, the academy only seats twice a year. We are beholden to those processes right now. The academy was delayed. It should have basically started by about now in January. It is going to instead start in March, owing to the fact that the previous class had issues with the pandemic. And because it starts in March, we're not certain if the next academy class will be in August, as it typically would be, or whether it will be later than that. We would have to give to the, the academy the, the names of the spots we wish to reserve on the day of the next academy. You have to give, make those reservations for the following academy. It's sort of like, you know, a city that has a really, really large college graduation, parents call in on the day of commencement to make reservations for the next year's commencement class in the Primo hotels. So the Vermont Academy is a Primo hotel, and we have to make our reservations for it on the very first day of the preceding academy class. That's March for us. And we need to have an ability to give them some names by then, and certainly a sense of how many officers we would be putting in if we were to put officers into the August 2021 academy. Our current staffing. So here's our current staffing. Our current staffing is at 79 effective. Now we are at 79 effective, and that is down significantly from where we normally are with regard to 96. I want to have a couple of things sort of laid out on the table for this presentation. Sometimes we're talking about sworn personnel. Sworn personnel are all persons who are level three law enforcement officers. I am a sworn personnel. Deputy Chief LeBreck and Deputy Chief Sullivan are sworn personnel. So our officers fresh out of the academy, although our most recent officers graduated from the academy back in last year. But we also at times talk about officer. An officer refers to non supervisory officers in the rank of police officer or corporal or senior police officer. But those officers are the ones who are in our detective bureau. They are the ones who are in the uniform services bureau or USB answering calls for service on the road, and they constitute the most important number for us when we're talking about staffing with regard to call volume response. Staffing going forward, this is where we get to our crux. We normally have 42 officers on our patrol. We currently have 41. We are at 79 already, and that's this is one of the adjustments that I made. The previous version that was there said that we would anticipated being at 79 in January and lo and behold, here we are. When we get to approximately 76 sworn total or approximately 36 officers available for patrol, we will no longer be able to provide midnight proactive coverage. There will be no proactive midnight shift. And that is is not a this this is simply what will happen when the numbers get to those numbers to those levels. And the rest of this presentation is, in part, a delineation of why that is because I don't want people to think that this is a choice we make lightly. I don't want people to believe that this is something that we are doing out of peak or as a way of saying, I told you so, or that this is a threat. This is simply what happens when we have the number reduction that we have had without any other kind of ability to take the brunt of this call volume requirement. I'm also going to present what is the important part of this, a possible plan for a way forward that says that despite the staffing decreases, there are ways that we could get people in who do not take 14 months or more for a hiring process who could answer certain amounts of our call volume, but are also not sworn officers are not armed officers are not the kinds of would not therefore have the kinds of encounters that some members of our community have said they do not want. This is a quick picture of an important aspect of our road service, which is that because we work for 10 hour shifts per week, 48 hours, 40 hours per week, we have two sides. So there are two day shifts, but they don't they're not in at the same time. There are two evening shifts. They're not in at the same time and there are two midnight shifts. They are not in at the same time. That is how you end up being able to wrap around the week and also wrap around the clock, which is, of course, the point of having 24 hour police protection in the city. To do that, at minimum, we need 42 hours. There are overlaps once a week, double days. We are currently but that double day functions because when you have four days on and three days off, that is there's there has to be an overlap there. One team is on for one team is on for there's only seven days in a week. We also have officers at our airport and are required to staff that airport. We have officers assigned to our detective bureau. We have officers assigned to the Chittenden unit for special investigations, which does sex crimes and crimes against children. And we have officers in supervisory roles, and those are officers who are not necessarily immediately available for patrol. We have specialized positions, although some of them have already been eliminated. We have reassigned our community affairs officer. So we no longer have a community affairs officer. That officer is on the road. That's a great detriment to our ability to connect with people to address situations that are not necessarily criminal in nature, but are more in line with community issues with that neighbors have with one another. And also is a key person in the way in which we deal with graffiti and other kinds of order crimes like that. We have an emergency response officer who has also been reassigned to the road, and that is a detriment to our being able to continue to hone the emergency response capabilities that we've developed with regard to our ERV or emergency response vehicle and our embrace of a system called ICAT, which this agency was a pioneer of leading, literally was part of the forefront of actually developing the procedures and policies around ICAT. And that has been demonstrated now in academic studies to be remarkably effective with regard to keeping people safe, especially in barricaded situations and reducing the need for the use of deadly physical force in situations. We have a domestic violence prevention officer that position is still staffed. It is a remarkably important position and is a key to being able to follow up on domestic violence. Officers respond to a domestic call. They are able to address that situation in the immediate moment, but they go back to answering more radio calls. The domestic violence prevention officer is able to make additional connections with the victims, sometimes even with the perpetrators in order to guide them all through the process that is the court process, that is alternative justice processes, if those are appropriate, and to attach people and connect them with resources. 41 officers available for calls. And here is a visualization of that two sided system that I talked about. You've got two sides for patrol. The team A and team B, for example, are two sides of the day shift. And so in this particular graphic, we're reading it from left to right and are seeing both sides represented with the names and the supervisors there. This what this means, this visualization shows is that very typically we have eight officers, if everyone's in, we have eight officers on patrol for 44,000 residents, for thousands of additional students for people who come into work, for people who come to this city to play, to eat, and while currently the city doesn't feel as vibrant as it has been in the past, that is not going to stay that way for long. We fully anticipate having this city regain the vigor that it is known for and have a nightlife that returns to to much older models as far as how robust that nightlife is. This also needs to be considered with regard to something that we call the availability factor. The availability factor is simply a calculation based on contractual leave and nobody works 100 percent of the time. Everybody is is entitled to certain amounts of leave. We measure only the contractual leave that officers are entitled to by contract. And that means that we have an officer 86.3 percent of the time, not 100 percent of the time, 86.3 percent of the time. And in other words, eight officers on the shift is really 6.9 officers. And again, I've said before, we don't we don't have 0.9 officers. I don't have a torso and legs and arms with no head walking around. But what that does mean is that we are never going to have. We very rarely have eight officers because the availability factor only accounts for contractual leave. It doesn't account for leave that might be associated with training or a person who has a crude time and just wants to take a day because she needs it or a person who is sick and he is not in because of sick leave, but not contractual leave. So even beyond the 86.3 percent, we often are lower still than that. This is a graphic of our historical sworn average. So our average over the past, we were authorized to generally 100 until recently when we got up to being authorized at 105. Thanks to a grant from the federal government, we never got to those numbers. And the reason that we never get to those numbers is that there is a excuse me because of that lag time that I talked about with regard to staffing. An officer can leave with two weeks notice or no notice. And we then have to wait until another academy class begins and initiate that process that takes up to 14 months to replace that officer. So owing to that lag, we are never at our complete staffing. And in fact, authorized staffing for us is sort of a goal that allows us to actually achieve the operational necessity that we have. Over the past eight years, our historical average looked at at snapshots on January 1st and July 1st of each year over the past eight years was 96 officers. And this is a picture of what you get with 96 officers. With 96 officers, you have a very robust police department. You have a department that has adequate staffing in its detective bureau and CUSY that has a street crime team. And street crime is incredibly important for doing certain kinds of open air narcotics work during certain kinds of crime patterns, burglaries, robbery patterns, et cetera. It has a full complement of specialized roles from our emergency response officer to our school resource officers, to our community fairs officer and domestic violence prevention officer. It also has a swing shift. And that swing shift is remarkably important because it's not part of the normal three shifts. It covers an additional section of the day and allows for flexible deployments when they are needed. This is how North Street was really changed. And the old North End was able to be changed from a more disorderly place into, I think, what it is today. This is what you have when you have issues on Church Street and you have robust staffing to be able to have a swing shift go in and deal with Church Street's daytime activities in ways that the day shift cannot because they are burdened by regular calls from service from many other locations. This is our current sworn staffing as of today. We're 79 sworn effective. And again, that effective number accounts for the total number that we have, which is actually 83. But from that 83, I remove a person who is on long term sick. That is a form of workman's comp. We will never see that officer again. We are just waiting to get that officer off of our roles owing to vagaries with the workman's comp process, but still paying for that officer. But we will never see that officer again. That's one of the 83. We have two long term military deployment officers who are expected to be gone for two years on their military deployments. That brings us from 83 to 82 to 81 to 80. And then we have another officer who is currently on long term injury and is we're uncertain of the prognosis for when that surgery will occur, but it will be some time and then there will be recovery from that surgery. And that brings us down to 79. So that's what we're counting when we count effective. I also have officers who are currently out sick. I have officers who may be on quarantine after exposures on the job. I have officers who may be available, who are, excuse me, on FMLA leave for personal reasons. Maybe an officer had a child, maybe an officer is caring for a family member. I'm not counting those. Those aren't effective officers either. They're not deployable in the immediate sense, but we all have to deal as professions and as businesses and as departments in the city with people who are sick in that way. I'm talking about who is deployable in a long term way. And for that is what effective means and we're at 79 effective. I'd like to point out here that the airport has three shifts as well. I don't I hope that it's not confusing, but it goes down the center there. There's a sergeant and two officers on the day shift. There are three officers on the Eves and two officers on the midnights. Those officers, that is the absolute minimum that is necessary to be able to cover that airport. And whenever somebody in that the airport goes out sick or is on vacation, we take from USB to cover the airport. This is where we think the staffing will be imminently. This is a picture of as I stated, I think I'd stated earlier, I wrote it actually on one of the slides that there are three officers who are known to be in hiring processes with other agencies. In other words, we've had communications with those agencies. So we know that those are official processes. Those are our exes. Another officer is expected to be deployed on a long term military deployment like the two officers who are currently on long term military deployment that I'm not counting in these pictures because they're already gone. We anticipate losing another also on a year or potentially two year deployment. That is the M that you see here. And so that would bring us down to 75 sworn and those departures are imminent. We don't know when or how long they may take. One of them I anticipate occurring before the March Police Academy begins. Others may take a little bit longer, but they also could happen quite literally in a couple of days they could happen. So we are assessing that that would bring us to 75. And again, 75 isn't 75. 75 is 65 with the availability factor. And that would have 38 officers for patrol, which is 33 officers with availability on a typical day. In addition to these, there are at least three additional officers that I know are exploring other options. We haven't had formal inquiries from potential other employers, but I know that they are anticipating. And frankly, there are going to be a lot of people that I don't know are exploring other options right now. There is a lot of uncertainty in this police department and a great sense of where is the department going? What is the level of support that I have from the community or from the folks we serve? And what are my other opportunities? So if we lose all these, we'd be at 72. And that is before we even think about the next slide, which talks about retirement, but with 72 sworn and 35 officers available for patrol, we would reassign our DVPO and we would also end our overnight coverage. Retirement eligible, this is quite a picture, too. I'm not even looking now at the potential or imminent departures. I'm only looking at retirement with these Rs. And we have five people who are currently eligible for retirement, including one of our deputy chiefs. We have a total of 11 people who will be eligible for retirement by September. And if all known departures and all unknown expected departures and all eligible personnel retired, our headcount would be approximately 59. Give or take a little bit. I can't know for certain whether or not people are going to retire. Frankly, the most recent retire, the most recent departure was a retirement of an officer with more than 20 years, a supervisor who I did not anticipate. That one stuck up on all of us. That individual was in a good role, but got a much got a really terrific external opportunity that came across his transom and couldn't say no to it. But we had no anticipation of that one. And that wasn't in any of our calculations. How many more of those are out amongst us? Not certain. So what we have here is a look of a very probable picture by September, essentially. I can't tell you whether this is exactly what it will be. I can't tell you whether it would be a little bit better, plus or minus four, maybe five or worse, minus five. So but this is this is the heart of that. And it is a department cut in half. This is 28 officers available for patrol. There is no overnight. There is no swing shift. We have an understaffed detective unit with no ability to have any street crime team. We have no community affairs officer, no emergency response officer, no domestic violence prevention officer, no SROs. All of those things are withdrawn from a department like this. Again, this is the historical sworn average staffing. And this is where we are, excuse me, not our maybe my apologies, maybe by September, historical potential by September. Here's the imminent change. And in this, the the ships have been rearranged a little bit. I didn't mean we suddenly went across the board instead of down, which is what we were doing before. But up on the top, there is two days, two eaves and two mids, and that's 41 officers, which is exactly where we are right now. You'll notice that the A team has one fewer a little blue person than the B team. And that's because we are short, that one officer who I mentioned being on long term injury with the shoulder injury. If we get to 36 officers, and again, we anticipate for departures in the short term imminent and we anticipate additionals that we maybe are not considering. If we get to 36, then this is the picture we have of a of a day shift that is more that is up to by one of an evening shift that's up by one. And the reason for that is that we cannot safely staff the midnight's if we reduce it to two or three officers. You cannot have safe proactive patrol with two officers for the entire city. The rationale for that has to do with calls and call types. So very quickly, I'm going to talk a little bit about call types. And this is not in the document that was posted. This is was added to this presentation, owing to requests from the chair. And I shared with him these call types and some graphics to go with them. But our call types are here. We classify calls for service into one hundred and thirty three call categories and starting in in March, Deputy Chief Sullivan created a new model for dividing them further into call type one, call type two and call type three. And these calls, these this division was designed to determine which ones we were going to respond to in person owing to COVID-19. We had to determine whether or not in the early days of the pandemic, when we were very concerned about its communicability, about whether or not it was the degree to which people were vulnerable to it. And had inadequate PPE supplies initially. We had to devise systems by which we would properly minimize our in person response without diminishing our overall response to people calling for us. And so type one here, which is in yellow, is are the types of calls that are most easily divertible to phone or online response for an officer to make communication on excuse me, by phone or for a complainant or citizen to report it online for redress at a later point. This is not a hard rule, for example, in progress, certain in progress events are going to be responded to as if they were in one of the other categories, category two or category, call type two or call type three. But it was a way for us to determine how we were going to change our workload in the face of COVID-19. As you see, call type two, which is in the orange color, those are things that we are much more likely to respond to in person. They are not really divertible. And in the red or pink, depending on your screen colors, that's called type three, and they are by far the most important. And those are the ones that are crimes to which we will always respond in person. Now, I if I did this over again, I'd actually reverse it and I'd bake our most important ones called type one. And I'd have the ones that are more divertible called type made call type three. And who knows, maybe I'll do that at some point. But the fact is that we've now talked about them so much that I'm not sure that's doable. I think we're kind of stuck with this. But if we put more thought into it back in March, I think I would have done it that way just because it comports with, for example, our general understanding of severity, that the idea is, for example, murder one is the most severe. But these are the call types. And here are call types by the numbers for the past five years and includes total year numbers for 2020 as well. In the past five years, call type one has dropped from nearly 27,000 to just under 14,000. And that drop was steady in the first four years and started to level out a little bit in 2019. That drop, if you look at our numbers with regard to enforcement, particularly traffic and particularly tickets that are issued, those two categories alone constitute the majority of this decrease. In other words, this decrease occurred not because of a change in actual call volume from people saying, I need services. This call volume, this call decrease happened in large part, more than half, owing to changes in how we interacted with the community. Under Chief Del Posa, we drastically reduced the number of car stops that we made and vehicle interdictions. And we're able to find other ways through the city and different kinds of traffic mitigation to maintain the same amount of road safety without having traffic tickets. And the traffic tickets that we continue to have were actually almost all transitioned over to warnings. So that is an example. Tickets similarly decreased significantly. That, too, is often an indication of officer proactivity that instead of issuing a ticket, you are having an encounter that is of a different nature, doesn't end with a ticket. You address the conditions in ways that are not enforcement based. Call type two, on the other hand, which are much less discretionary and are going to be things that are happening owing to individuals behavior was pretty flat with the exception of 2019 where we saw a real increase in disorder on Church Street and in the vicinity of City Hall, particularly. And that was commented on in the news. People felt it. It is very interesting to me that, despite the fact that Church Street is essentially empty and has been since March, it's gone up and down. But we all know that it is not the same place it was. And we can't wait for it to get back to being the place that it was. Despite that drastic decrease in activity, call type two did not decrease that much between 2019 and 2020. And in fact, 2020 is higher than 2018 was. So that decrease that we anticipated seeing owing to the general decrease caused by COVID-19 simply wasn't apparent in call type two. And in call type three, our most important and serious calls, it went up as everything else was going down, plummeting. Call type three went up from 2019 to 2018. These are the most dangerous calls. These are the ones that require robust response and oftentimes very intense investigation after that require resourcing. They went up as everything else was absolutely shutting down. And I do not know where they are going to go once our city comes to life again. But to go back to the discussion that brought us here about staffing, the reason we are talking about eliminating overnight coverage is this. The overnights are slow. That is the time when call volume drops precipitously. And it's seen in this heat map that shows calls from 2016 to 2019. We know that the Vermont State Police do not currently have 24 hour coverage. They have a call out system that they utilize. We are looking at something similar. We are looking at having officers in station, but not on proactive patrol. We are examining a lot of possibilities. But once we get to approximately 36 officers available for patrol, we will not be able to have the kinds of coverage that we currently have. And in order to maximize coverage at the time when call volume is highest and the most people are calling for us to give the most when the most is happening, we would eliminate the midnight coverage from a proactive perspective. What would be in its place potentially a night watch? We are not certain yet what comes next. We have discussed with the VSP how they work, the Vermont State Police, how their model works. We have discussed with partner agencies about their expectations for us. Just as this call began, a number of our officers were called by South Burlington for a large confrontation that was happening in the vicinity of the University Mall. That's called Mutual Aid. They raced over there because South Burlington is not staffed as robustly as we are for now. And they are there to assist partner agencies. Mutual Aid, however, hinges on that first word, Mutual. We can't expect the people of South Burlington or the officers of Colchester to police our city for us because we don't have sufficient resources. So what do we do in order to cover that time period at night? This is one possible model. What are the next steps? There is no short term fix for what I've described. What I've described is going to happen. It is not something that we can change tomorrow. We could be authorized to hire tomorrow and we won't be able to begin to hire until August. If there is a Vermont Police Academy class in August and we're not certain of that. There are lateral officers that you can bring in one at a time, but they too take six to seven months, especially now with COVID and the ability, the very restricted ability to meet with them or have them come in for the proper interview processes. They are not, although they are already sworn officers in other states, they can't automatically become officers here. They have to go through all of the processes that an officer here does. They just don't have to live at the police academy. I am a lateral officer. It took me well over a year to finish all my work, but it took me a certain amount of time to be approved, to go through my background checks, et cetera. And I was expedited because I was coming in as a deputy chief with officers. It takes at least six to seven months to get a lateral in. If we could get in-state laterals, that is a much shorter process. That's really only about as long as background check and then our own field training processes to familiarize those officers with our unique roles and rules in Burlington. But I'll be frank, there is not an officer in the state of Vermont that wants to come to the Burlington Police Department. So for us to get laterals, they will come from out of state and have a long hiring time. They come one at a time and they are small and important roles. I've got great lateral officers. I'd like to think I'm a decent lateral officer. It's certainly something that we are always willing to look for, but it's not a solution, nor for that matter is a full academy class. Academy classes, we never get every single person that we put into the academy class through the academy class, and it takes time. So what can we do in order to think about where we go and how we begin to address this problem? Because we have to address it. The calls are still going to come in while they have been depressed this year or this past year owing to COVID-19. They are going to pick up again, and we will be in a position of not being able to respond to them. And for every man and woman inside this department, that is something that is unacceptable and haunts them even as they prepare for its eventuality. So assessments and data would be one way to try to figure out what to do next. And as you all know, as members of the Joint Commission, excuse me, the Joint Committee, we are supposed to be in the midst of some assessments, and they are taking a little bit longer than we anticipated. So we don't have the benefit of what those will bring to us, although we can incorporate the benefit of what those will bring to us into whatever things that we do going forward. And I look forward to incorporating the take from these assessments into what we do going forward. But we cannot wait for them. A problem well understood is a problem half solved. And I do think that those assessments have the potential to help us well understand our problem, but we can't wait. Time is a thief and getting data from the assessment that was prescribed will be helpful, but it's not going to happen. And this slide was not yet updated since it says the fourth week of December. We are in the second week of January. So a two year plan, something that potentially puts us back on a footing in a shorter time frame of two years, rather than, frankly, the five to six year that it might take to get the department back if it could take longer. Again, that tipping point is lurking out there somewhere. I don't know where it is. I don't know at what point officers start to leave who would not otherwise have considered leaving because it gets so burdensome with regard to overtime, with regard to a lack of staffing, with regard to the pressures that come when an agency is under resource. Where do we go? There are kinds of calls that we can divert to employees who don't take as long to identify, check, vet, and hire and train as police officers. Some of those are calls dealing with homelessness or quality of life or non-criminal mental health incidents, so not crisis incidents, certain kinds of juvenile disturbance, certain kinds of public health violations, certain kinds of traffic congestion, parking violations, dog and animal complaints. Right now, many of those are in fact dealt with through our community service officer. The community service officer is not a sworn police officer. The community service officer is not armed, does not carry a firearm and does not have arrest powers. The community service officer can write municipal tickets, that is tickets that are described in the city charter as violations of our municipal code, open containers of alcohol, for example, noise complaints. But we have to be careful with that because sometimes those kinds of encounters can become problematic. And one of the reasons why we ask police officers in whom we've invested certain amounts of authority, as well as training, as well as tools to undertake those roles is because those roles are fraught. Even something as simple as an open container ticket on Church Street can become fraught. So we have the ability to take some of these and offer them to community service officers instead. We currently have two community service officers, one on each side of the day shift. They were not depicted in the previous graphics because we were only talking about sworn officers and sworn personnel, but we do have two of these and there is a potential for more. We also have the potential of having something called community service liaisons or CSLs. We have one person who functions in a role very similar to this, the invaluable Lacey Smith. And she is terrific and I would love to have more. I will say, however, that I would have wanted more Lacey's, even if I had 105 officers and was fully staffed at my old authorization level. I want those positions because they are service enhancers for what we do. They do not address the actual meat and potatoes of what we do from a call volume perspective. They are this, they are something that addresses the root causes of those calls and we hope that they help us get those calls reduced. They are something that helps us address the aftermath of those calls and we hope that we don't have calls in the future. They are the essence of prevention and they are terrifically, terrifically valuable and I would want them, even if we weren't in this situation, but they are not the answer to the thing that we are looking at with regard to calls coming in and fewer than necessary officers to address them. Hiring CSOs and CSLs, this isn't a fast process either. I looked at one of our current CSOs, his hiring process was about six and a half months and that's short. Normally, the time for a CSO, and I'm talking about CSOs, not CSLs, start to soar on the road after training and field training is seven and a half months. So we can tighten it a little bit, but every time we tighten, we do so at the risk of quality control. So that's something to keep in mind. Nevertheless, we also have to think about the fact that the pool of applicants isn't always as large as we would like it to be. The last time we hired CSOs, there were 10 applicants and only two made it through the process and one was hired. CSLs, we don't know yet. We don't know how long that process will take. We've only done it in small bursts. We had somebody who's not similar to the CSL role was the role that was played by our opioid coordinator, Jackie Corbley. Now, she was a much higher figure in the department. She was essentially an executive. She sat on the executive side in the office currently occupied by director of police transformation, Dodson. But the hiring process for that is a little bit more streamlined. It's going to entail background checks. It's going to entail all those things that can take quite a bit of time, but there may not be a field training process necessarily for CSLs. We're not quite sure. So we can think that it takes a little bit less time than we are pictured here, but not radically less. This is the public safety continuity plan. And this is the heart of what could potentially give us something like the services to which Burlington has become accustomed when it has a 96 plus person in the police department with fewer than 80 police officers. It depends on the results of those two assessments because we can't really implement this until we know what those assessments bring us. It depends on the viability of being able to offload police services to other positions, and it will take more than two years to implement fully, but that is less than the five or maybe even 10 that it would take to actually get this police department back to 96 and more officers. The total proposed that it shows here is 78 and that is above the number of 74 that was mandated by the resolution in June, but it is much less than what we have. Now, again, to get to 78 pictured here, as the same as it was with having 96 officers and 105 authorized, 78 requires a higher authorization because of those lags in hiring. What we see here are the two proposed shifts. I'm all I'm showing you the current shift picture and I'm showing you the proposed shift. This is the times two means that I'm only showing you one side of our of our shift. And the same is true of the table that is on the right hand side of this slide. So we talk about a head count target because this is what you have when you have that lag and that head count target is what we see in the graphic that the actual number of bi-annual snapshots never quite got up to the authorized number, but you needed that authorized number in order to be able to actually implement hiring processes that got you to an effective number in order to perform the role that you were developing and was expected of you. For the over the past, excuse me, eight years, the department's averaged 5.6 officers below its cap. Therefore, to get 78 officers, we would need a cap of 84. And this was part of the slideshow as directed to the city council. These are what we're this is what we are essentially seeking and it's being honed. It's being honed in the form of a resolution that's being drafted. It's being honed in the form of a memorandum and of a presentation by by me that clarifies some of these issues. We need to look at some issues such as job descriptions, which we have for the CSO. We're developing for the CSL. We need to look at budgetary issues and how those will impact what we're requesting. We need to look at a a a sense of organ organizational chart and where some of these would sit. We need to think about the potential for certain kinds of calls and flesh that out a little bit more than this presentation has done about which kinds of calls can be diverted and potentially not only just the CSO, but also the CSL. And so all of that is is going to be part of this presentation that we're continuing to develop. But the ultimate ask is an increase of that cap from 74 to 84 so that we could immediately begin to attempt to get people into the August Academy class. I'm not certain that we can do that. We don't have a pool of applicants waiting, which we normally would at this time relative to the coming Academy. It's also a conceptual approval of the CSO and CSL plan and the idea of being able to go back to this to do this, to put these additional CSOs on each shift. So going from the one that's shown on the left on the day shift alone to having three on the days and three on the Eves. And that's actually not three. That's that's the total of of twelve because three and three but times two for each side is twelve. And so getting those people on board and getting conceptual permission and agreement from the council is one of our action. These next slides are things that you know, you know very well how much work the police department has done with regard to cultural competency and building that and also reducing bias. These are listings of trainings that we've had since 2005, nearly 50. And we are currently we have just begun as training session with a woman named trusty loving, who has given us something for the first time, which is that we are having shifts meet with her as teams. We are going through an iterative process that is not just a one day or one weekend session, but instead it is going to be drawn out over a number of meetings, six or seven, I think, total with each team and actually going through a process of really understanding anti racism. We also want to talk about building understanding in and this advertises our Community Academy, which for unfortunately we were forced to cancel because we didn't have sufficient folks coming in and we're looking for other ways to make certain that we can take what we would have shared through the Community Academy process and distribute it through the community, through other ways. But we want to connect with the community and that is absolutely the key here. These staffing issues are an immediate problem. They are a symptom of something that underlies that is much greater, which is our issue with trust and how we build it and regain it and then keep it. And that is a question that is not merely going to be answered by bringing in CSOs or CSLs. Frankly, it wasn't going to be addressed by simply stripping away 30 percent of the police department either. So where do we go from here? I'm hopeful that we can have a discussion about that with you commissioners and that we can talk about your thoughts on this plan in order to bring those thoughts to the city council. Thank you, John, for that. All right, then. All right. So this kicks off our discussion amongst each other. So I'll let anyone open up with any questions or comments they have for the chief regarding that presentation. I'd like to clarify. Randall. Thank you, chair. Yeah, thanks, chief. So one quick question is just going to be. With respect to how the CSOs and CSLs would interoperate with the sworn officers who were on the road. So it seems like you're suggesting still that the minimum staffing would still be six sworn officers, plus any additional CSOs and CSLs that you could add to kind of supplement that and and account for the fact that some of those calls not going to be answered by the officers. Do you do you see do you see kind of any interoperability between those CSOs and CSLs and the sworn officers so that you might not need to have six sworn officers? Basically, I could CSOs and CSLs operate in a kind of backup capacity for dealing with the sorts of calls which require increased police presence because of ICAT and other other techniques. Could some of that work be done by the CSO CSLs or not? I don't think so. I think that six is really the minimum that we can have in the city that is safe for officers to be able to respond to the kinds of incidents that we are always going to want them to respond to. The the the disturbance that was happening over at the U mall is not something we would send CSLs and CSOs to that is an incident that is going to result in the use of force or at least it's highly likely to result in use of force and we are not going to send unarmed and unsworn persons into that kind of situation. So we need to have adequate resources for that with regard to an ICAT type situation where we have a barricaded person, God forbid a barricaded person is armed, God forbid a barricaded person is armed and has somebody inside with them. We need sworn officers to be able to address that. You can use a CSL who's been negotiator trained to be the negotiator. You can put a helmet and a flak jacket on that individual and put them in a position to be able to trying to do the talk. And that's that's useful. We routinely do bring other resources into our ICAT situations if they're available. If we have a person who's barricaded who has a Howard caseworker will bring that individual in to talk to the person. But the entry, the stacked team that's prepared to go in if it becomes necessary. The team that is going to be observing other exits, depending on how many this place may have, those have to be sworn off sworn officers. And a scene with two points of entry and a person inside who is known to be armed requires at least four people. And you've got to have three on a stack at the front and at least an armed officer in the back and really to be safe. And then a supervisor on scene. So right there we're already at six to simultaneous domestic violence incidents in town would or that's four officers. So in different parts of town you have that happening. And you know, we have there are a lot of scenes that just eat up resources in that way. So I don't I don't think you can get much lower than six because again, the availability factor tells us that six is not six it's four. And the idea of having one officer that's less than an officer per area. The CSOs are going to be able to divert a lot of the kinds of calls that take up time for an officer. And they are calls that have regular interface with the community in ways of the community currently says that it's uncomfortable with or that it feels unsafe about or parts of the community say that they are uncomfortable with or that they feel unsafe about. But it is not going to be something that allows officers to stop responding to the kinds of calls that we need them to respond to those type three calls that are going up and are going to go far far up in 2021. I have a second question, but I see a hand by Dr. Dodson. Dr. Dodson followed by Randall. You're OK, Chair Gommas, should I speak? Oh yeah, absolutely. Thanks, Commissioner Harp. I think that's an excellent question and it's the conversation we need to have. I'm just very hopeful that we are soon able to get to a point where we can have community members involved, commission, police officers and talk about what we want and what we expect. I think I would say that commissioners Grant and Gommas and Harp, you were at the Department of the Day and we're watching an incident of being in your feelings. But I wouldn't say that was an aberrant experience. That could happen at any given point and I think it would have been a real problem to have that dealt with by a single officer. So for me, I think the community should be in a conversation about what we want. So someone burglarizes something. We know we see them and there's a need for apprehension like that. Do we, as a community, say sometimes we'll let those people go. But if there's an expectation, which I think there is now that that person is apprehended, unfortunately, and because I'm concerned about this idea that talking about these needs is fear mongering, whereas when I look at it, unfortunately, it's just logical. We're in a tough place and there are a lot of factors that at least the way I look at it, it's going to be tough. It's true. Eventually, the community is going to open up, but the community is going to open up after having suffered incredible economic hardship. There's going to be cabin fever. We're going to have a high school downtown. We're going to have kids who have not been together. We're going to have kids who have been behind on their learning. There's a lot of things, none of which necessarily point towards order and calmness. I would argue and maybe there's a different scenario that I'm not seeing. But you know, I think that's what we're looking at. And this idea that in a big city like this, there could be multiple things happening at any given time. Policing is an insurance policy. But I think it doesn't. It's not fair to have that just be the police. If we feel that we're willing to roll the dice and say, hey, there's going to be times when stuff goes down and we just can't respond, then I think that's fine. But I think there is a expectation now that things happen and there's a response. And it happens in a way that's really hard to anticipate. But when it goes down, you got to have the resource there. And maybe I'm excited for the assessment and perhaps there are professionals who look at this differently, but just intuitively as I look around and I see and I watch videos and understand training and live in the community, it does seem like there are conversations that need to be had just about that, you know, intersection of multiple things happening, the severity escalation, our expectation as a community of how things get followed through on, etc. But this is provocation. I don't have the answer, but this is just how I look at it. And, you know, the idea that chief says we need all this and then somebody else community says that fear, that's fear mongering. That's just it seems like a back and forth that I'm not sure is to be productive or helpful. Thank you for that director. Randall, I believe you were next with a question followed by Stephanie. Yeah, thank you. By Karen, sorry. Thank you. This is another question for the chief. So are CSOs and CSOs, are they level one, level two certified officers in a different month? No, they're not. Okay, they are not, they're not certified as law enforcement officers at all. Okay. And then is there any kind of time savings that we're forgetting officers who are level one, level two certified rather than level three and those are those resources that could be used to handle some of the workload. So level two, level, level one and level two officers, it has to do with the amount of supervision that they require. It has to do with whether or not they enjoy their police powers when they're off duty. It has to do with whether or not they can handle certain kinds of major crimes. So in fact, you know, there are certain things they can't do that they have to actually pass over to a more to a level three officer. I don't see that as a path forward because for this reason, level one or level two would have to come from within the state really because it's not a lateral officer from out of state somebody from in the state that is seeking to be a police officer. And I don't think they're going to come here to do that kind of work. It would be we'd have to institute an entire new position. We'd have to negotiate probably with the BPO a in order to do it. And we'd have to figure out whether or not there are any kind of of other kinds of considerations with that. So I don't see that as a path. That's something that generally is done by much, much smaller municipalities that want short term coverage. Sometimes it's a level that is taken by retired officers who don't want to maintain their level three status and instead sort of fade to something else. It's essentially a part time police officer in a lot of places. So I'm sorry, just to repeat the question, but are there kind of time savings in terms of the time it takes to get an officer up to level one level certification? No, I don't think it would be. I mean, it's less of a there is there is not a police academy for level one. They go through, you know, much shorter onsite training there. And it is field training. I don't know what we do because we have to develop a field training course for it. But I don't see that there'd be any real time saving. And again, I don't think they're allowed. There's a lot of things they can't do. I don't think that they can actually serve paperwork. They can't write VCVCs, which are Vermont criminal complaints. And I'm not certain they can even write municipal tickets the same way a CSO can. Deputy Chief Sullivan is raising his hand and he may know better than I. That's true. And the the latest iteration of one, two and three used to just be a part-time officer versus a full-time law enforcement officer. But my experience has been that a lot of times the part-time officers are not somebody who would be eligible to become a full-time officer due to certain circumstances, whether it be the agency that they're working for or just their lack of ability to complete the full-time police academy. So in generally speaking, I don't know that you're getting the best quality out of an officer like that. Whereas the auxiliary officers that we have are only officers who have retired from BPD and have stayed on as an auxiliary officer. Thank you for that. I believe it was Stephanie followed by Karen. I'm Stephanie. We can't hear. Sorry, Chief Miller, I wasn't clear from your presentation on the SROs. Does your plan include removing them from the schools and bringing them into regular police work in the city? Or they do regular police work in the schools. But eventually, yes, the the the the draw the picture shown is a picture that does not have the final picture. Once we get as our staffing plummets, we will have to withdraw them from their positions in the schools. OK, thanks. Sorry, Karen followed by Leida. Just a couple of questions and I don't thank you for all the information and the information sharing. I just want to keep this kind of short. The midnight shift, Chief Murad, that is what hours are you referring to when you talk about? I think I saw on your on your presentation that it was from four a.m. to seven thirty or three a.m. to seven thirty. Is that correct? Yes. So when you have ten hour shifts, obviously they overlap by quite a bit because the day is twenty four hours and ten three ten hour shifts is thirty hours. Where that overlap occurs is almost entirely in the overlap between the eaves and the midnight. And why? That's because in normal days, when we have bar closing or at night, that's when shenanigans occur. There's there's a period of shenanigans that follows right around the time that work and school it off to. But for the most part, when is it that people really start to get a little bit rowdy? It's those later hours. So our midnight shift actually starts at twenty two fifteen at ten fifteen. So they come in at ten fifteen and they stand roll call at ten thirty. There's fifteen minutes of time for them to get dressed and get ready. They stand roll call at ten thirty. They get an explanation of what's happened during the day, what they're looking for, whether or not it's been active or not. Or sometimes they don't. Sometimes it is such a hot shift that they are often running right off the bat. But the reason for that is that the evening shift does not end until two forty five in the morning. And so we essentially have two shifts overlapping and on at the same time from ten thirty until two thirty in the morning. And that is because that's the time when things happen. That's the time when people who've been drinking all day really start to get to the point where that drinking has led them into some other kind of mood. That is the point where the bars start to close and you get activity then. And the you know, the person that you've been looking at all night is suddenly now either is ready to fight or not. And so when those things happen, we have a maximum number of officers. We'd lose that. So even though we would still have an evening shift, they would not have the augmentation of having that midnight shift in because the midnight shift wouldn't exist. But we would still have coverage until two forty five when the evening shift goes home. Starting at three, two forty five or three, we probably adjust the evening shift a little bit back to end at three. But starting at three o'clock, we would not have anything. We would have potentially no service, potentially a single officer here in the station house to be stationed as security because this is not a secure facility in the sense of well, look, we just saw what is supposedly one of the most secure facilities in the planet overrun. So we are in a facility that has weapons, it has contraband, it has evidence and we would have to leave someone in it. And most importantly, it has our live dispatchers. And so they are in this building and have to have an officer present. How many more officers would we bring in? We're not certain right now. Frankly, there's a risk of having an additional officer or two officers because if those officers hear the music as it were, they are going to dance as it were. And if calls come in, they're going to want to respond, but it is not safe to send one or even two officers to certain kinds of calls when there's nothing else available for them to back them up. So we're not certain yet. One officer in here solely security, three officers with two that are deployable to certain kinds of extreme situations. We don't yet know what that's going to look like. But the time frame would be 0300 to 0730. OK. And my next question is you are mentioning some of the officers that were leaving, making plans, what have you? I know that we talked about Officer Drinkwine. Was he included in that? He's he has been he resigned from the he is not. Not not. Yeah. OK, good. He hasn't been counted in any of the presentations I've given because he has been off the books from before then. Yeah, I don't I must have missed that conversation. And then in terms of the assessment, the we're talking about, you know, bringing someone in to assess the situation, I would agree with you about the time that it's taken to get this forward. I want to just personally, you know, just sort of, you know, I know there are people listening, you know, you you presented, you know, folks with with a an RFP outline many months ago. So just for people who are listening, you know, we've this has been in the city's hands for a long time. And personally, and I can't speak for the whole commission, but personally, the assessment talking with other police officers and checking references and what have you, I have to concur with the comments that you made about the assessment being a tool that we could probably get a lot out of. But it's not it's not likely to fix our situation here. So I appreciate your work on that. And thanks for answering my questions. Thank you. Awesome, Landon. I just I think that the the SRO for the Burlington is leaving is I believe the school the school board passed something earlier last year. So I know that for sure. But then I also had some questions about the midnight shift. What is the most common statistically statistically? What is the most common call during the midnight shift? I don't know if I missed that. I didn't I didn't provide that. I don't know the answer to that. With regard to the SROs, the school district has not yet made a determination. The the city council stated that the program would be over at the end of this school year. But the school district disagrees and has a task force working on trying to determine what will happen and where it will go. And so that is an unfinished process at the moment. And the school board, I think thinks that that determination is really for for it in the department to make. Obviously, the resolution says differently. Each may be moot if we are if our staffing continues to plummet because I will have to pull them. But as as Director Dodson pointed out, you know, having the school in downtown is a place where those resource officers inside the school are going to be more necessary than ever with regard to being able to connect with students who are there and be able to prevent officers, road officers from having to go in to that and deal with students. Road officers are not going to deal with students in the same way that SROs do. I can look up the what you're looking for, Commissioner, and actually get you that information. What's the most common type of call? What do we see and try to find that information for you? Yeah, I just feel like that would be important because we're considering scenarios. We're talking about scenarios where they meet back up or something like that. If that is true, you know. Also, your increase in type two and type three calls, I was wondering how you thought that related to the recession, because obviously those usually go up during are those like robberies? What are we looking for? Like in those increases specifically? Well, so if let me find something for you that is a little bit indicative of that. You know, where are we with regard to activity? So of that type three that's up by four three percent, four point three percent, there are serious specific call categories in that. And a lot of them are up, not always by a lot because some of these categories have very small ends and that's good. They're very small numbers, but when they move, they move. And when everything else is down drastically down by by seventeen point two percent, total calls are down by seventeen point two percent this year. When everything else is down that much and this categories goes up by four point three. That's significant. Our homicides and homicide attempts are up. Our gunfire incidents are up. Our aggravated assault is up. Our aggravated or we have an aggregated category that is domestic disturbance, domestic assault misdemeanor and domestic assault felony. That is up. Burglaries are up. Sex assaults up twenty two percent and overdoses are up seventy one percent. That's not fatal overdoses. We experience very sadly a double fatal overdose today, but over general overdoses in twenty twenty were up seventy one percent. How did the pandemic play into that? That will be the job of academics to study and parse for for quite some time. I'll tell you it's because there was despair because there was a lack of human connection and connectivity. Going home two nights ago, I pulled out of one North Avenue and headed north on North Avenue towards my house and had a deja vu moment of North Avenue absolutely empty of cars in late March. I think sometimes we forget a little bit of how absolutely drained the city was in late March and early April. It was stopped and people were not were going out of their homes. They were not allowed to go out. The early governor's orders were very strict about stay at home. And and how does that not affect people who are already often mentally vulnerable who for whom substance use disorder is already a proxy for certain kinds of connection. Of course we were going to see these kinds of of increases with regard to crime there too. We you know it does play a role in that we have seen upticks in burglary especially commercial burglary. But you know we one of the things that was not on that list was robbery. We did not see a uptick in robbery partly because robberies require victims in order to commit a robbery. You have to be able to find a victim and there were large parts of the year where there were no victims to be found. But you know other crimes economic crimes we haven't seen large increases in those and I I push back on the notion that economic desperation leads to economic crime. I think that undersells humans. Think that undersells people. I think most people do not give way to crime simply because there is a certain straits in their life. Yeah OK. All right. I also just trying to think I had a response to that left my head for a second. Would you foresee any of those going down as we reopen? I mean you know I or is that up to the academics? No I do not foresee any of those going down as we reopen. And I regret saying that in my experience police live by being able to keep a handle on disorder and crime. Our mission is to keep people safe by preventing and responding to crime and disorder with and for the community. That's it. That's the whole thing for me and I don't foresee us being able to live up to that with the staffing issues and with what we will see as an explosion of Joie de vivre. Once this ends. All right. Thank you so much. And Deputy Chief Sullivan had a hand up. I don't know if you wanted to weigh in on that. I apologize Mr. Chair. I was going to say I saw DC Sullivan with his hand raised. I had a question followed by Randall. I just wanted to speak to the commissioner's question in that anecdotally. I mean, I've worked nights pretty much my whole career until recently as an OIC running a shift. I would say that although the heat map that was shown earlier clearly shows that call volume goes down, I would say those calls are very, very unpredictable. Again, if people have been drinking, I know as an officer in charge, for example, especially Friday and Saturday nights. If midnight shift was light, for example, with only four officers on that midnight shift, I would hold evening shift officers at least two until probably 435 a.m. just to make sure nothing happened because that's when severe domestics come in. We recently had an attempted homicide. I can tell you personally I was involved in the Skorola attempted homicide years ago. And that came in very early in the morning. So I would say that it's very unpredictable as far as the nature of crime in those early morning hours. And it can be quite severe. Thank you. And my question for the chiefs, as someone who bartends nights and I work a lot of those, I guess, those higher volume nights Thursday, Friday, Saturday, what would be the possibility of having partial midnight shifts, not for the entire week, like, you know, but possibly for like that early Friday morning, early Saturday morning, early Sunday morning, which are, which I believe are the most action that happens for those late night shifts. If we were to end the midnight shift, then we would have to cover that probably by overtime and come to an agreement about that with the union. It is also conceivable that depending on how badly our staffing drops, you know, they're different numbers. There are places where the staffing is sufficient to have one midnight shift, but not two, you know, one side, but not two. Could you have a side that only worked those days? You could. But you just described the days where nobody wants to work those, you know, all year round, people the way our current shift works is that they swap every month. So we officers bid for a tour that lasts four months. And if they are on the side that does not have weekends off in the first month of that tour, the next month, they do have weekends off and then they go back to not having weekends off and then they go back to having weekends off and then they rebid and they've got a new tour that they're bidding for and they change again. And they may move from days to eaves to midnight, etc. And their rules in place to keep them from being on one tour for too long, excuse me, one shift for too long. But if we were to do something like that to essentially say that we're not going to have a regular shift, we're only going to keep one side of that shift. And by the way, it's not going to swap back and forth each month. That would have to come with compensation. Thank you, Randall. Thank you. Yeah. So my question is just about how the hiring would work for CSOs and CSLs. I understand that we don't have, there might not be a lot of chart card already for CSLs since that's a fairly new position. But essentially my question is, so I see on the on the slide deck that you mentioned that, you know, city applications have filled out and submitted and then they have the 10 weeks of CSO field training. But I'm wondering whether or not there are opportunities to further the department's goals of increasing diversity among its applicants with this hiring process. So I'm wondering whether the applicant pool for CSLs and CSLs tends to reflect the applicant pool for sort of officers or whether that is a different applicant pool historically and then whether or not there are ways to kind of increase targeting of the social community would like to increase representation of it. Thanks. That's a very good question. And I'd have to refer it to Dave Clenan, our recruitment officer, to take a look at that and see who we've had as applicants in the past. I do think that there is an opportunity to connect with particularly new American communities in the city for the CSO role in a way that we have not yet been able to do with officers to our regret. And I think that that is there is possibility there. I also want to point out, however, that the CSO role is often a stepping stone to being a police officer. If it were to become that in this case, it is not necessarily the kinds of officers that sometimes the community envisions when it thinks of the quote unquote perfect officer who frankly doesn't exist. But when they think about, you know, police officers who have MSWs and are doing all this at the same time, that's not the kind of person we're going to get to take a CSO role at the wages that are paid for for a CSO role. But I do think that it's a possibility of getting people in there who have certain kinds of sometimes police interaction that would probably be relatively prohibitive for getting a police officer position, but would not necessarily be prohibitive from getting a CSO position. And that's a possibility too. So just follow up really quickly on that. So I mean, so I've heard at least anecdotally in this department in the past and other departments in the past that there's sometimes frustration with having candidates who might otherwise seem good candidates to be officers who are not able to pass, for example, the written examination to become an officer and that that is kind of impacting the applicant pool. Do you think that, so is it conceivable is it possible that officers coming through in the CSO position would have the kind of, for lack of better word, on-the-job training that would kind of make it easier for them to pass whatever exam this would require to be a level three officer or is that unrelated? I think you're certainly exposed to a lot of things. I think part of the problem right now is that I'm not 100% sure that the test that's given at the Vermont Police Academy is related to policing and you could basically be a police officer or be in super proximity to police officers the way CSOs are and not get a leg up on that test. I think that that's one of the problems that we have and reassessing how to redesign that test is an issue. The other parts, physical, passing the physical exam is the physical exam. I think the biggest issue with regard to recruitment at the police academy level is that the academy experience itself is one that is not conducive to certain folks. It is not easy to go through that academy if you are a single parent. What are you going to do during the week? It is not easy to go through that if you have real life obligations that are that you can't meet when you are away in Pittsburgh for five days a week. So CSOs don't do those things and therefore that alone opens the position up to different kinds of applicants. Thank you. All right. I had Karen up next, but DC Lebrecht, were you going to answer a question first? Yeah, thank you, chair. I've been a field training officer for 15 years now and I've run the program for I think seven years and going back to Commissioner Harp's question that I certainly believe like the CSO position would be a very good stepping stone towards becoming a police officer. So like folks that would allow just looking at the struggles that new officers have like as simple as talking on the radio or understanding the ordinances for the city or even one of the biggest hurdles for people is understanding all the different streets and where everything goes and how to get there in the city. Those are all you know really tough things for new officers that have never lived in Burlington or have come from the outside even from the inside the state but not lived in Burlington. Being a CSO for a year or a couple of years those CSOs if they went on to become or try to become police officers I think would have a leaps and bounds over somebody who's just come in from another state or from outside of the Burlington area and for people maybe that are having would have difficulty with the entrance exam and the PT. This would also allow us time to work with them. They would be in the PD. They would know officers. They would understand our job a lot better. I think that that certainly is a huge plus to having CSOs. And yeah, it would be a huge stepping stone. Also in so much is I think having understood what our job is when they got into the academy and got into field training we would have a lot less people not make it through the training, I think because they would have a much greater understanding of the job and a comfortableness I think with already with the community how we expect them to act how we expect them to present themselves our expectations the community expectations. Yes, all those types of things I mean the program itself is is really important. I will say there is one caveat if we increase the amount of things that they're going to do. Right now we do not have like a field training program for the CSOs. They basically I think when Gavin our newest CSO came on board he rode around with Cassandra who was the CSO that was the only one we had at the time. That was two weeks of him riding around with her kind of learning the ropes a little bit and the rest he did on his own if we expand that role we are going to have them in positions and doing things where the liability them and also the liability of us if they get injured or something is going to be increased. So we would need documentation the reason we have a field training a field training program and Burlington has a 14 week one and I'll just go to say like most places like on the average for an adult learner to learn this job like in the field is around 26 weeks. So even at 14 weeks we are not really even close to the norm normal average for the for the US. But the reason we do that is so when an officer you know they get on the road by themselves and something happens and they're injured someone else is injured and they say oh well I never learned that or I was never shown that or I you know we have documentation saying yes on this day you did this type of call which is what this was or you went to you know you know you you you checked off and you knew the streets or whatever it is we will have to probably do that as well with the CSOs because if they get in a situation like oh well I didn't know that I was never shown it and somebody who has just a two week training I don't think they probably would have a good argument saying yeah I wasn't shown that so we might have to just add on a little bit of time I'm not saying they need to do 14 weeks that not not at all but they might have to we have to create a field training program for them and a certain amount of time maybe three weeks or a month or something like that for training. Thank you. Karen followed by Randall sorry. Okay I just thank you for that because that gave me a lot to think about just a couple of other logistical questions for any of the chiefs and this is really just to get an understanding of what's happening in the department it's really just operational and or development questions they're not big ones. So I heard tour the tours are those based on seniority is that assignment for if you're bidding a tour is that something that seniority matters. Yes the tour assignments you bid based on seniority and officers with the most seniority bid first so our airport is routinely staffed by officers with the most seniority. Okay. And where else can you just talk a little bit about where else the department might be under resourced from your perspective you know just in terms of maybe I mean I know but it's the question. Careful, careful what you ask for commissioner. You know we are you know we can always use additional resources training is definitely a resource that we want more of we were forced to cut our training budget by 30 excuse me by 70% to 30% we cut it by 70% for COVID not owing to the resolution that was a decision that was made as we were preparing the budget in began beginning in late March and through April and prepping it by the beginning of May and those were preparations made knowing that the city's revenues were going to be severely impacted. So training is a big one we love more resources for training training is complicated I for example right now I do actually have some money to send to I have two supervisors I would like to send to supervisory school I can only do one because I can't afford to lose two from the road and then lose them for our quarantine period after returning from out of state training session so that that is you know that complicates everything this notion of when we're when we're staffed the way we are how do we pull people out to get the training that they need when that causes further reductions on on the road or in DSB or wherever those officers serve administrative we certainly need additional administrative help if we are going to implement the kind of digital release policy that this commission envisions I am actually OK with just releasing video as is I think that we should probably forego a lot of the redaction that we currently think about but I'm not certain how others feel about that if we're not able to forego that redaction then we need additional resources for it we won't be able to comply with your requests and not because we don't believe in it and not because we don't want to and not because we are being problematic we simply we won't have the number of people necessary to do it people go home at night and you know I think that we'd also love to have resources in a number of spots I think that you know Commissioner Grant has spoken frequently about the idea of increased communication and improved communication and we've talked a lot about the idea of inviting people in letting them understand things again not to speak for Director Dodson but Director Dodson's sitting in this building has given him a very different understanding of what police do and we do not give him Kool-Aid every day that's not a that's not what it is it is simply understanding more of what the role is and for us to be able to communicate that outside is is tremendously important to us and tremendously valuable but we don't have the resources to do it so those are just a few of the places that I could conceive of having resources in addition to these CSOs and CSLs the CSOs are about addressing a problem that is right in front of us right now and isn't going away and is only going to get more pronounced and is is a small address for that. The other kinds of things are things we're talking about again that I'd be talking about if we had 105 officers. OK, and then just thank you for that. Um, and just one you know question and it keeps coming up in conversation. Um, so my understanding that is that there is no human resource for the city. That position has not existed for a couple of years. Who who and so the police department really manages its own discipline and administrative HR work? Well, no, that's not quite accurate. So we do work with HR routinely. HR actually HR deals with our payroll. HR deals with questions about whether or not officers have medical leave available to them or not. That goes through both our administrative lieutenant and the administrative deputy chief, which is deputy chief Sullivan. But it goes to a member of the HR team who is assigned to the police department, not in the building, but is our person. And she's great. Team member Danielle Kota. Terrific, really terrific. And we are lucky to have her able to do to work for us. And she's always responsive to our questions. So so and then when we get to disciplinary situations in disciplinary situations, we routinely involve HR as well. If that discipline is rising to a level that is going to involve, for example, a loss of time or or some kind of larger repercussion. If it's verbally admonitory or if it's retraining, then no, that's not an HR issue. That's going to be dealt with by a supervisor and sometimes might not even rise to the level of a chief. But if it's going to involve a significant infraction and significant potential penalties, we absolutely involve HR in those decisions. They guide us and we involve city legal to understand how we're interacting with the contractor. Sorry. Yeah, I know that happens to me in my office. So it is the HR role is performed by another city employee who is not in the department. That is correct. OK, thank you. Oh, and just apologies, Mr. Chair, they're very involved in training and onboarding, for example, not training, excuse me, but onboarding. So bringing in a new employee on has to go through HR and there's a lot involved in there. So yeah, and I just that's I guess what I was asking is, you know, we're talking about the process, you know, the length of time and I was trying to get an idea of, you know, just how much administrative work was going to be taken on by somebody who was not in the department. So thanks for that. I believe Reba had his hand up from before followed by Sherry. I think, you know, just a quick question. Two quick questions. The first is are CSOs and CSLs represented by BPOA? And the second question is, have you gotten any feedback from BPOA on these proposals? No, to the first, neither is represented by the BPOA. CSOs are represented by AFSCME. We anticipate probably having bargaining issues if we're going to drastically change their role. So it depends, depends on whether or not we are just evolving what they currently do in smaller ways, but just giving us more of them to do it and thereby withdrawing from things police do. Or if we are going to really change what their role is and withdraw police from a lot of calls entirely, then we're probably going to have to rebargain. And have we spoken to the BPOA? Absolutely, the BPOA has been, you know, dialed into these discussions for quite some time. They know that this is a proposal. I think that their mind is the same as mine. There are things that the police shouldn't be doing. And to the extent that we can get other resources to do some of those things, whether it's a CSO or a CSL or building other resources outside the police department, therefore that. I do think that we all acknowledge that this is what we hope is a good plan done in time. It is not the best plan, but a good plan done in time and beats the best plan done too late every single time. Thank you. Sheree. Thank you, Chief. Just a couple of questions on the slide about retirements, about retirement eligibility. Did you so it shows to two of the chiefs, but I thought I heard you say one, but is it in fact two who will be eligible this year? Deputy Chief Sullivan could turn off his zoom right now and just go. I pray that he does not, but he could and Deputy Chief LeBreck could do so on February 5th. Can you I know this year will be unusual and last year was unusual, but can you estimate the percentage of officers, for lack of a better term, who do retire when they're eligible? Instead of staying on. I'd say we don't get a lot of officers that make it to eligibility. A lot leave earlier than that. We've had a nutrition problem in this agency for several years now, and it became more pronounced around 2016, 2017. It certainly, I mean, it's even more pronounced right now with the situation that we're in, but we already had one. I would say most officers probably leave when they get to 20, although there's a buffer and do they have other opportunities? Are they looking for other things? Other officers hang on. The longer you hang on, the larger your pension can get. And so there are officers who have well exceeded their 20 and are, you know, striving towards other digits, 25, et cetera. But it's rare that officers go past 20. You know, it's I think the longest serving ever that we know of is the great John King. I think John did, what, 35 years? I'm looking at Wade and Matt, something like that. Just so you know, he started before I was born. He started in 1965 as a police officer, and he's still working as parking. It's rare I get to say someone started before I was born. Can I just speak to that question to some extent? Absolutely. So the retirement system is broken up into three groups. There's a small group of us that are left that are in essentially the first tier, what we call the first tier. Then there is a small group of officers who remain in a second tier and then most of the most of the officers currently are in a third tier. So each retirement system is different. I can't speak as well to the third tier as I can the first. But essentially we have a 25 year retirement system with a reduced penalty enabling officers to leave at 20. And so I can tell you that the officers that remain who are in that first tier, the majority of them most likely will go when they hit 20 years. Thank you. Thank you. I don't have any plans on going at 20 years just so people. I guess I had a slight question. Probably not to be popular. What I know the city's broken up into five sections. Is there is there possible thoughts about changing that up moving forward as the numbers kind of shrink? I mean, obviously, besides the city won't change, but possibly maybe, you know, A section, B section, D sections. I don't know. Are there ways to kind of like rejig that to possibly spread out what we have left moving forward? That's that's definitely a possibility that we could look into trying to determine, you know, these these areas have existed, I think at least since Chief Ennis really instituted community policing at the turn of the previous century. And so it's possible to rethink those. They make a lot of sense when we look at it. Places where we might merge are questionable because we're actually growing in ways that are making some of those mergers less likely, if anything, for example, if the higher ground complex gets off the ground in the Burton facility at the south end, that's going to be a remarkably, that has the potential to be a remarkably busy part of the town. And, you know, initially it won't be, but it could really evolve into something that would actually require not area would go from being a relatively sleepy area that senior officers kind of go for to being an area that is really, really hopping. It's already busy enough because market 32 has so many larceny calls, shoplifting calls that it's a very busy that's a very busy sector much busier than it used to be anyway. Chief LeBrecht. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Just speaking to the chief, having been a canine officer, I was assigned to E area. They use normally we had put the canine officers in A area and E area because of the lower call volume. It would allow that officer to use his dog and other areas of the city and not put a bird in on other officers having to respond to that area to take calls. And I will tell you by the time I finished retired my dog in 2015, mostly in E area. It was it was easily one of the busier areas. And now because of the restaurants and the breweries and stuff and higher ground market 32 Buffalo Wild Wings and the businesses and stuff that have kind of sprung up on that Pine Street corridor. It really has become a very vibrant. It's a great part of the city. And I think it's only going to continue to grow. So an area like that instead of requiring only one officer may daytime and even the evening time require two officers to have that as their assigned area or increase the amount of officers on. You know, we have split the city and dire situations to north of Pearl Street and south of Pearl Street, which you could do kind of divide the city in half. But that would require more officers on that side of the city. Thank you. Chief Son, I would just add that we have seen somewhat of an anomaly with obviously with this year due to covid. But I can see a time when our call volume is rapidly going to start pushing 40,000 calls for service again. It was not that long ago that it was in the high 30s on a regular basis. And this is a more recent trend where we've seen call volume go down. So for example, traditionally the downtown district and the Hill section were the busiest sections of the city. And again, and B area could sometimes be pretty busy. And A and E were the least busy. But just as Deputy Chief LeBrec and Chief Murad described, you have the Pine Street corridor that has grown quite a bit. And there's quite a bit more activity down in the south end. And in C area, quite frankly, we've reduced call volume by approximately 50% or more than 50% since 2012. But I would argue that that is largely in part due to the quality of life patrol that we partnered with UVM and UVM funded that project where we would put six officers assigned specifically to C area. Now you just saw the presentation, our whole shift a lot of times we're lucky to have six officers for the whole city. We will put an additional six officers in the Hill section proactively patrolling just the Hill for quality of life issues. And I feel that's largely responsible for the reduction in call volume from 2012 until now, obviously with 2020 being an anomalous year. But I can see that I reverse it. The Hill section that I remember from October fests in like 1991, 92 is not the Hill section that we have today. I guess to follow up on that. I know UVM has a small police force in your talk about how you guys parted up with those community quality life things. Have they been included with any at all with these talks at all? Because I mean, I guess for an example, Redstone campus, I think it's technically burnt in property. But it's mainly used by UVM. Like if there's a call for service that happens then, does UVM respond to that? Or does BPD respond to something that happens at Redstone campus? So UVM currently responds to Redstone campus. I'm not exactly sure when that changed over, but we used to cover the Redstone dorms, I want to call them all the way down near the golf course on Redstone campus. But UVM now covers that area for us and they have been included. They've been included in the quality of life detail. But their staffing has been of such a fluid nature also that they've had very limited resources to contribute. They would send maybe one officer down that we would partner with a BPD officer to patrol the hill section on some of the details. But that was really hit or miss, especially in the last few years. Thank you. Hi, this is Milo Grant. I have a question concerning UVM. What is the normal expectation for what UVM police should be doing? They essentially just police their campus. That is their priority, is campus safety. And that is what they focus on. They do a limited amount of traffic enforcement surrounding the campus. And then they have engaged in the quality of life detail. But that is essentially the extent of what they've done. They have very rarely over the years sent officers down to bar closing occasionally to essentially gain more experience. And they would partner with a BPD officer and essentially be down there. But that was that was very very rarely occurred. How many officers do they have on average? Right now, I believe they have 17. Do they they do 24 hour schedules or at least they used to. Do they do still do 24 hour schedules? They do. They do. But with a very limited number of officers has the city ever talked to you VM about you VM adding and paying for more officers given the I mean, obviously everything's different right now with covid but the size of the campus has definitely grown over the last few years. I don't know the answer to that. I know there have been discussions over the years, especially associated with the quality of life because you have a lot of students living off campus and you VM has been a great partner in that detail. And it's a data driven analysis and then we try to focus resources on problem areas. So it was evidence based policing, if you will. And I feel like it had a great impact on the quality of life issues associated in the hill section. But again, their their primary focus has been campus. And although they have built quite a bit of housing, most of that is on campus. And then you have this this intermingling with the community, especially in the hill section where there are a lot of rental properties and a lot of their students are in that section of the city. Although I will also say having been involved in that detail for several years that many of their students are spreading out also into other areas of the city. There are many living in the Old North end and now down in the downtown area as well. It just seems to me that that would. I feel like I've always felt like that would be really worth deep diving stronger collaboration and also quite frankly. UVM assisting financially. Given the increase in population base and given the need, especially during those peak times downtown. Even do we ever collaborate with Champlain? Does how many officers does Champlain have? Champlain doesn't have police officers. It has a public safety team. But I find it interesting. I think one of the interesting things about this discussion is the fact that it acknowledges that the need for police in the city is X and that the reduction does not achieve that X. I'm just trying to have an understanding of what the colleges do. Given that because we also know that Champlain has grown over the last few years. So I'm just trying to I guess it would be interesting to have presentations from them to know what numbers they're dealing with pre COVID. How would we who would we need to talk to to? Yeah, I don't know. Am I the only one interested in this? Would other commissioners find that interesting? Milo, you're talking about hearing from the campus police at UVM. UVM and Champlain. Because when we know about, you know, I hang out downtown in the past, I've certainly hung out downtown a lot. And I know that not all of the students downtown are they're mostly UVM students, but they're certainly not all UVM students. I'm just curious. I'm just curious. Also, I'll certainly reach. Is it still court era? I also I. Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't interrupt you. I'll try to recall. I think it was the head of UVM police, but I think he's no longer in that position. But I'm more than happy to reach out and see what they have to say about this. I think I saw a hand raised by Stephanie, followed by Randall, followed by Landon. I don't know, Chair Kamash, if we've reached kind of the point of discussing the issue where we're still in the question and answer period. Can I get your thoughts on that? I have a comment for Milo, but I'm happy to wait until we get to the discussion period for some other comments. I mean, I'm I was literally going to let people answer questions till they're done. So great. It looks like we are getting through that point. Just a response to Milo. I have some data for UVM and Burlington just on traffic stops, which gives us some indication and UVM does patrol off campus. And last year, they conducted 1500 traffic stops compared to roughly 2000 in Burlington. So I just to put that out there, that there are presence off campus as well, at least in terms of traffic stops and maybe some other issues. Stop are almost entirely in the vicinity of Maine and the campus and East Ave and the Jug Handle. But the fact that it's 15 and that we're 2000 is because we have gone from an agency that made 7500 stops in years to an agency that doesn't practically none for a statistical purpose. I believe we're maybe just under 1200 for 2020. I think I think Deputy Chief LeBrecht raised his hand. I was just going to say, I know in the past there had been some talks with the city probably when I first started. So the early 2000s about UVM monetarily contributing more because they were growing in size and the same with Champlain College because they were using city resources like police and fire as well. Like for ambulance and even UVM rescue is required to have a Burlington fire engine with them when they go on calls now so that their ambulance can actually respond to a call unless Burlington fire department responds with them. So yeah, I believe if you looked I'm not sure what years but there was some talk of that or remember back in the day. But if they did come into Burlington for like a more like contractual type thing, they would have to have their own supervisor because they technically respond to you know their chain of command is whoever their supervisors are. We would have very little control over their officers and also for the oversight that everybody's been talking about their Burlington wouldn't have the oversight for them. It would have to follow through the disciplinary programs that they have in place up at UVM. Thank you. I think I had Randall Landon and I'm not sure who comes after that. Yeah, thanks. No, I had a comment. I'll withdraw so we can get to the discussion, the substance discussion. Quick, I had thoughts about the UVM thing. I'll just say I think it's not terribly relevant for the discussion we're having today, which is caused like the special meeting today. So I think there might be it might be worth while having that conversation down the line. But I don't think there's been an appetite for kind of trying to use UVM campus police resources to address any staffing issues that BPD faces. And likewise, I think it's not going to be a lot of appetite on UVM's campus to have BPD taking over some of the functions of UVM campus police. Probably the idea behind campus police departments in general, not just in Vermont, is to kind of lessen the presence of traditional police departments on university campuses. Landon, I was going to say basically what Randall said, I don't think that the UVM kids would be exactly happy with an increase in pay towards policing. To solve it. It just a quick comment and I can say that I feel like our collaboration with UVM was very valuable. They're a fantastic partner. And as far as that quality of life detail goes, just so people are aware, UVM would set aside $100,000 to fund that detail. And what that was was over time. So these were officers that have already worked the regular shift. These were the regular scheduled days off and they would sign up to work additional shifts and that money would fund the officers pay for working those shifts. And it had a fantastic impact as far as driving down call volume in that area. And there was a lot of proactivity to it. And it's interesting, we saw an inverse relationship between calls for service generated from citizens and calls for service generated by officers. So as proactivity of the officers went up, the calls generated by citizens went down. And I would say that over this most recent push, contemporary push for police reform, UVM canceled the detail for this, well, last year, last spring, and it has not existed this fall. So traditionally that detail would occur in the fall over the most busy time period in the Hill section. And then again in the spring, as the weather broke when it would again be busy, but that no longer that has not existed. So that's why I feel like over the course of the next few years, we will probably see an uptick in call volume in the Hill section again. Thank you for that. So I think we're first done asking questions, I believe. Let's move on to the discussion part of this. So let's begin. I'm sorry, Stephanie, do you say you had to get a comment before you wanted to do? Yeah, I'll just, if you don't mind, I'll just wait to hear a few other people before I share some data with you. Awesome. Well, it looks like you were at the top of the queue. All right. Could I share my screen? Please do. Do you see it? It's a lot of numbers, but I'll just work through them just for a moment. I wanna just start by saying that I really appreciate the detail of the presentation and the request, which as I understand it just to confirm is from 74 to 84 officers and hire some additional CSOs and perhaps some CSLs. We are, there is a long lag in the RFP to review the call volume and the ability to divert to other agencies for services. And I appreciate that. That said, I think we're on the verge of that contract and hopefully it would have a report by early April, maybe end of March. When I look at this, I see, I understand the supply side of this, that is the change in the number of officers, but what's also important to me is the demand side. And this is what these numbers are. So these are the numbers that the Chief sent to us and I've just laid them out in a way that trying to evaluate what the trends are. So I'm just gonna, I'm gonna highlight this area right here. And it is also this graph right here. So one way to compare the data is, I think it's erroneous. I think it's better to compare the data to not from 2019 to 2020 because 2020 is an odd year. And also, so I've compared it to previous years over time. And I wanna say something about this kind of slipping my mind. So what I'm looking at here in the total change from 2012 to 2020 is the percent change in total calls. So what you see is there's been a 40% decline, but maybe it's better to compare it to 2019, which is a more normal year. So that change in total calls is 15%. And if you look at by call type decline of 21% in type one, 5% in type two and 6.6% in type three. So I noticed that the chief also compared to 2016 and we have roughly similar numbers. And if you see it here in a graph, what we see is a fairly, I think a notable decline in calls for services. So while there is a decline in the number of officers, there's also a decline in the calls for services. And I think the greatest fear that people have around this is that there will be some violent act that the police won't be there to provide support on. And I appreciate that. And so I also appreciated the information. I'm gonna scroll down now to look at the information. Again, this is the data that the chief presented us. And these are annual data on a variety of types of events that occur. And I think it's useful to look at it in terms of percent changes. So here again, in this column is 2012 to 2020 and 2012 to 2019. So I think it's good to look at to 2019 because again, 2020 is an aberrant year. And what you see here is in most cases, there is a decline for the very serious crimes, for example, what you see here, however, what's really notable is the increase in mental health issues. And it seems to me if there is a place that we wanna support, provide additional support, it's something to address this, which is more in the line of CSLs perhaps. I'm not, I don't pretend to be an expert, but I'm just telling you my reaction as a person that looks at this in terms of data and what I do know. If you look at some of the other events, for example, Berkley's, there has been a sharp decline in Berkley's over time. And a variety of other areas. And so if you look at this all graphically, this is what it looks like. That one of the largest increases in mental health issues is mental health issues. And that is a frequent event. The other increase is in stocking and I have to scroll up to find out. But those are stocking is an infrequent event, right? There are 19 of those calls. So even though the percentage increase is large, it's not a huge increase in demand of time relative to some of the other events. And the other is lewd and lascivious conduct. And that too is a roughly rare event. But in some of the more frequent events, like as I said, Berkley's disturbances intoxication, there's actually been a fairly substantial decline. And so I would just say, I'm gonna just sort of as a placeholder put this out there that it seems to me that we can't just evaluate the supply, but we also have to look at the demand and that given the decline in demand, that it behooves us to wait for the RFP to be completed so that we have a better understanding what needs are. Down here, I did something really rough because I don't have precise data, but I'll just maybe enlarge it a bit for you. And that is calls per officer. I mean, these are sort of crude measures, but for me, it gives me a way to understand the request. And so I don't have the exact number of officers per year, but I tried to capture it. And I'm thinking roughly 96 in 2020, 79. And what I see is that actually calls per officer has also declined over time, both in 2019 and in 2020. That's it. If you would like, I can stop sharing my screen or if anybody wants to share. Mr. Chair. Yeah, you can stop sharing your screen and I'll let John answer that and Randall has his hand up that I see. So I do pretend to be an expert in these issues. And what I will tell you is this, that more than 61% of the decrease in total call volume comes from traffic enforcement alone. That is a discretionary choice on the part of the department and the officers within it to stop doing that kind of encounter, largely because of work performed by Professor Saguino. And the decision to dial back on that is 61% of the total decrease in call volume from 2015 to 2019. And with regard to some other issues there, mental health has gone up. It's gone up at least in part because we now are much more diligent about calling calls mental health. That's not merely tracked by what is coming in from the caller. It is also what the officer chooses to call it or recategorize it or whether or not the officer clicks a box on mental health. And we are being far more diligent because we've been driven to do so about talking about mental health as something that frankly is a source of us desiring additional assistance. Burglary is down, robbery is down tremendously because of the resources that were put into that by our detective unit and by the incredible work that they've done in following up on all those cases and enhancing every single one and making certain that the road learns how to handle it better and push it up to the detectives who then track it and tackle it in a way that is far more effective than it had been in the past. That's why we're seeing decreases in those numbers. And what I would say is that those decreases are terrific. They are the result of resources. They're the result of having police officers in place to do that work. If you take them away, what will happen is that those calls will increase, not calls, those incidents will increase because we're gonna have people who are coming here knowing that there are no police from 3 a.m. to 7 30 a.m. And it's the best place to burgle in the state. There are gonna be people who there are currently or there were until about a year ago people who would not come here. People who knew that the downtown scene was not a place where you wanted to do things because there were quick solutions to crimes. We have a team of detectives, for example, that can find, that can solve Stone Cold who done it in the course of a couple of weeks. And the other aspect is this, that when we talk about the idea that this decline in demand means that it would behoove us to wait longer to continue to answer calls from people who need police response, every weight that we have gets us farther and farther from being able to actually plug these gaps. And when what we're talking about is it's easy to say that I don't need police services. I do not need police services in Apple Tree Point. I'm not the one that these police services are going to. I think for us to speak on behalf of the folks who do need these police services and are not gonna have police coming when they need them is really, really tricky. Director Dotson. Thanks, Chair Gommas. I think this is an interesting conversation. And I, as we move through this, I increasingly want to be certain that I'm clear in people. Here what I'm saying, one thing that I think's interesting, I love, and so in my respect, the data work Stephanie does, but it strikes me that just from my experience in the department, what that doesn't capture in which I continue in the press, and I hope I'm saying it clearly, is what that data can't capture is clumping, right? We know all those things happen. We don't know when they happened. And I am not at all arguing for a certain number of police to increase the police, but it certainly seems that there needs to be a community conversation about it. Because even with it less, the community has to understand we might, we could build a force where we say that there are times when cops say, no, I won't do that. But some amount of those events, like what happened with the stickup of the store at the corner of Winooski in Maine, and the car running into the house, and all of that, that was a clumping of things that you could go a month, a month and a half, two months without all that kind of severe activity, or it could happen in one day or one night. And you just don't know with policing and it's fine, but I just think that we'll have better conversations, we'll be in a better place if the whole community has access or some more representative group than those of us who are on these calls, understand the complexities. It is a complex function and you are, it's imprecise. You will never be able to get demand and supply mashed up properly if you wanna have the ability to address things when they happen, particularly the more serious things. And I might be wrong there, but that seems the case. You try to get close, it'll never be precise. And if we're going to say, well, the demand doesn't seem to warrant, which it doesn't, that kind of force all the time, then we can shrink it and say, but the community should know what that should mean because it seems to me that less force could mean that things could go down, there could be deployment around the city and things get undone and that might be where we need to go, but I just think there should be that conversation because from being in the building, being have access to things, there's a complexity and a level at which things are happening that it's hard to capture in a graph, in a table. It's a dynamic, it seems to me to be particularly dynamic. And I know for me, I just like in my profession, I like accountability. If people are saying they wanna have things a certain way, I say, okay, you understand what that means. And then if people understand what that means, then we can do it. But I think that there is a certain degree to which policing is the thing where we as the community often wanted both ways. And I think we should clarify and get in the middle of that so that we can all be on the same page. Thank you, Randall. Yeah, thank you. So I'm not exactly sure, Stephanie, consciously whether that was a suggestion. So I understand that there are two proposals that were on the table, right? One with respect to the hiring cap and one with respect to the kind of conceptual proof of the CSL slash CSL kind of enhancement of current police functionality. And so I wasn't sure whether you were suggesting as a result of the numbers you put forward, kind of doing nothing expect to both proposals or just with the first proposal about the headcount. So I'll speak just first about the headcount. I mean, I'm not sure that I think that's going biometric of kind of calls for service per officer is the best way to go. And I'm not sure that just looking at calls for service is the best way to go for the following reason. It seems to me as though there might very well be a kind of minimum level of officers that are needed in order to provide the sorts of services that are required. So it might be kind of baseline level of service, which you can't go below that without, and you can't decrease the officer headcount below that without seriously impacting the sort of service which can be provided. So it's not as though it's not as though it's gonna be completely linear relationship the entire way through if you decrease the calls for service by a certain amount, you might then need to, you can't continually decrease the number of officers by the same percentage. So I worry a little bit about that. I also do worry about the kind of timeframe that we are talking about, because again, I certainly think that having a, coming to an agreement about what the longterm kind of headcount should be for BPD should entail some kind of look at the overall service and how this can be siphoned off, including looking at the results of the consultants that are coming in. So I think that all that needs to happen, but I'm not sure that just kind of waiting, doing nothing until that happens is the best way to go. If it seems as though kind of the way the headcount was fixed right now is below a level, which is kind of a critical level for certain services being provided. So if the headcount had been set at, again, let's say 80 rather than 74 initially over the summer, it might be that this would not be a conversation. But because it was set at 74 rather than 80, there's this conversation. It might be that that initial setting at that level was just too low is a worry. And then the last thing that I'll say, so those are kind of, yeah, so those were some concerns that happened. The last thing I'll say just about the second proposal about the CISLT itself is I do think that's continually finding ways to kind of, getting a headstart on getting both kind of new types of officers into the building, new types of services can be provided by officers is, I think, a good thing, and one which we should kind of look towards doing sooner rather than later. So certainly with respect to the CISLT and CSLT, I would push back against the idea of postponing that discussion for the results of the consultant work that's happening later. That's all I've got. Can I just ask you to Randall, I might have misunderstood you. Are you saying that we should pursue looking at the different types of officers, but you're in agreement with delaying the, looking at hiring officers, sorry, sworn officers? I don't know, so I- Sound in the background. Yeah, that's right, thank you. I am actually in favor of, so I'm certainly in favor of the second, and I am in favor of having a further discussion on the first, I mean, at this moment in favor of the first as well, we might want to talk about what the numbers themselves should be, whether it's 84 or something else, but I'm in favor of both proposals right now, just given my concern that the overall department head count not drop below what I take to be a kind of critical level for the providing services. Okay, thank you for that clarification. Anybody else have any further thoughts or discussions on these two things? Karen. I just, I didn't want to, the background noise. So I guess, I had reviewed the data, and I guess what I wanted to say was, first of all, thank you for Professor Commissioner slash Seguino for putting that together and putting it in a different way to look at it. I think it's going to behoove us to make sure that we are looking at data in different ways, especially when it comes to speaking for the community, representing the community and the concerns of hiring concerns that there are out there. So I appreciate it and I think Director Dodson provided some good feedback on that. I guess what I'll say, just to be, I am not an expert, don't think I'm an expert, will probably never be an expert, but I've just been in conditions that have not had enough staffing. And so my questions are going to be, and my sort of end result is going to be more from an organizational development standpoint, but, and I also think that, thank you for providing the fact that, some of the data is taken care of because we've taken some of the call volume, we've taken some of those calls out. So I appreciate all the conversation around it. I guess my concern is still the amount of training that goes in to get somebody, whether they're sworn or non sworn, out there to protect citizens. I just, I still feel like even, I felt guilty about the process for reference checking just to get this going. And I know that there's RFPs across the city that need to be dealt with and answered, but it's a long process and I don't even see April as actually the end of this process. I think it will probably be May and I'm just concerned with the length of time that it will take. I know that I saw DC Sullivan's hand up, so I just want to, it doesn't happen up now, but. I think I'll just. So I just want to jump in right quick. I'll let you, I'm just going to try to keep this for us for deliberating. So if you don't mind just keeping it short. Thank you though. I just want to say these are all great points that have been made. And one of the things that's very difficult to estimate is the complexity of these issues. Director Dodson touched on a little bit. It's our operation is highly complex in the way we deal with any sort of incident and it requires a great deal of resources to ensure safety of individuals, especially in very critical incidents such as barricaded subjects. The other issue that the commissioner Cedrino brought up as far as the mental health issues is an excellent point. Also, and unfortunately when we tend to get involved in mental health issues, it's devolved to the point where people are calling the police for help because they see the situation, they recognize it as a dangerous situation and then they're calling police because it's already devolved to the point where really there's no other resource that's able to handle that situation. And so our ability to put some more resources as far as CSLs go and doing some more proactive outreach will hopefully mitigate some of those situations devolving to the point where police have to be involved. But we also have to understand that it's a very complex mental health system that has its own very specific rules that can be very frustrating for law enforcement because the threshold, for example, for an emergency valuation is very, very high. And so people who we may feel need intensive inpatient services are not receiving it because they're not meeting legal thresholds to essentially receive those services in that manner. So these issues are very complex and they don't just involve the police department. They involve a lot of other systems surrounding the police department. So thank you. I saw Randall's hand up. Followed by Director Dotson. I'll let Director Dotson go first, if you don't mind. Director Dotson. Thanks, Commissioner Harp. I also think in this moment, I'm one of the things I try to discipline myself to do when I guess I would suggest or reach out and wonder how much each of you has done this. And that is for us to imagine being a different circumstance and to envision getting to a place where we have the trust that we want, the police department functioning the way we want and what that might look like. For example, I would argue as an observer that so much of where we are now is it seems being driven by politics and by hurt and anger and mistrust, which is all legitimate. But I don't know it's the only way we want to function. For example, it would be interesting if we looked at supply, demand, call volume, resource for the fire department, which we don't at all. So municipal department, I imagine it's pretty expensive. I imagine the pay structure is not that different. We had that horrible fire in my neighborhood the other day. A lot of firemen probably showed up. But the downtime between that fire and the last fire was probably a long time. And so they're sitting in that fire department all the time because we don't wanna not be ready for King Street when it happens, but there's some similarities. And yet we're not questioning it with the fire department. And that seems like not the only thing, but to look at that, if we didn't mistrust the police, if police didn't abuse power, if whatever these things, what resource would we have? Because hopefully someday we'll be there and it's gonna be really hard to hire them to get there as we've learned in this. And let's look at other cities, cities that feel great about their cops. What are their numbers? What's their demand supply? When people feel great and they have a full police department and they have mental health services and they have a place to put, they have beds to put them in, what does staffing look like? Because that's optimal. And I would hope we're building for the optimal. And right now, I think there's just a lot of jockeying and it's about things that are important and relevant now. But my sense is we're hoping to get to a place where the landscape looks different. And once again, that fire department analogy seems important because there's a lot of time where fire, the men and women in fire department, they sit in the station. There's a cost and we could, for 80% of the time, we could probably carry a lot less to the force. But for 20% of the time, we need them there. The numbers are, I hope people get my point here, that just all the angles at which we look at things and that angle seems important. What are the healthy communities around the country? What's their conversation look like? What would Professor Saguenna's analysis look like in those communities? How do they think about the number of officers they have versus the supply-demand issues if they feel good about their cops? If they feel like this is a public safety system and mechanism that we like. Are they questioning it in the same way and what kind of compromises and trade-offs do they make just to help inform our discussion? Thank you, Randall. Yeah, thank you. So just my last point on this. Yes, so look, my goal is to try to ensure that policing in Burlington is done well. To contribute to that happening as insofar as I can. I do worry sometimes that there's what seems to me a kind of facile assumption that fewer policing, fewer police means policing is done better. That there's a kind of interrelation between, there being fewer police and policing being done better. And I just think that that is not correct. I certainly think that one of the goals is to stop police from doing things that they are either not well-equipped to do or ought not be doing. And so we should understand kind of what those things are and get the police out of that particular equation. But it doesn't simply mean that fewer police is always gonna be a better policing, situations, policing outcome. Also, I mean, this is still preliminary because a lot of this is still going on is the course in terms of preliminary. But there have certainly been cases where cities and departments that drastically reduced the number of officers they had on patrol. Sometimes these are budgetary reasons, sometimes direct response to protests had more cases of policeness conduct because police were overworked. And having overworked police officers is not a better outcome. What we want are the number of officers who are executing the task that we want them as a city to execute and are trained to do so and are positioned to do so well. And I do worry that kind of asking officers to be more overworked is not a recipe for having better policing in the city. So I would want to kind of ensure that the officers that we do have that are on the committee, and like I said, this is not at all mutually exclusive with the overall project that I also endorse of kind of revisioning what police look like, what police are supposed to respond to, all those things, I think that's extremely important. But I would also kind of want to ensure that while police have these particular functions and while we look at that broader project that we ensure that there is kind of the minimum threshold that's required for police to not be doing their job badly. Stephanie, and I couldn't tell Karen, was your hand raised before or was that just, okay. Thank you. Thank you, Kyle, thank you for your comment. I want to say that when you allude to politics entering this, this is a fraught moment in Burlington, but I would hope that you trust that the commissioners here are evaluating this on its merits, not based on political stance in any way. We are, I think, doing the work that we're supposed to do. And there is always a principal agent problem in scenarios like this in which you have, whether it's the superintendent or the executive director and the board has less information, but is trying to make a decision. And that's I think what we're trying to do very assiduously. I want to frame my evaluation in a way that maybe is not well understood. This is not about reducing the police force at all. For me, the issue here is about whether we are in such dire straits that we need to assert the RFP whose goal was exactly to assess this issue with people who are qualified to do it more so than we are as a police commission. And when I look at the data that I see, I think it behooves us to wait, to hear, to get the report from the consultants on this to evaluate it. It seems precipitous given the call data that I see to move to hire more officers now. So that's my perspective on it. And I would say that what I would be looking, what I'm looking for as a police commissioner is also sort of innovation. So for example, there are eight officers at the Burlington, at the airport. What are the possibilities of reaching a great arrangements with other agencies on a temporary basis because we're talking about this as a temporary situation in terms of getting us to the consultants report about where we want to go. So I'm looking for innovations rather than simply a return to the status quo that may not be necessary given the call volume I see. So again, I'm not talking about, Randall, with regard to your point, is not talking about less police officers in general. It's about what do we do in this interim period in which, yes, we are facing these staffing challenges that the chief has identified, but at the same time, we are going to have people who are experts giving us advice on this in a couple of months. So I want to just frame my response that way. Next we have Karen followed by Milo, followed by Randall, followed by Cobb. Thank you. So I'm going to try to be brief, but so I've done some of the reference checks and talked to some of, you know, I was lucky enough to get another call from folks around this RFP. Also, I just want to stay in terms of the RFP. It is way behind. I mean, it's way behind it. I think the, I appreciate everyone's comments. I think the sense of urgency centers around, you know, how long this process is taken and then how long it's going to take to, you know, potentially higher officers. The second thing I'll say is the politics piece, I really have to speak to that. I hope that, you know, everyone here will understand that this isn't a political board body. We don't, you know, this is about public safety. Certainly we are all very, come from different places politically. So I want to just not, that doesn't, hopefully that doesn't need to enter the discussion. I think this body in particularly works very well given the differences, you know, I can call somebody who is very progressive politically, but that person will still listen to me and give me the time that it takes. So please, you know, this issue as a black woman has been politicized enough and it's not going to happen here because anybody who tries to do it, I'm going to say something about it. Second of all, just wanted to talk a little bit about what we're talking about when we started this journey. 30 years ago, more than that, mental health was defunded. And we didn't just say, okay, we're not going to have these services anymore. The police are going to take care of it. It's not as if the police were given a budget with which to take care of mental health calls. It wasn't as if they were given additional training or resources to take care of these calls. And these are the calls that we're really struggling with. And these are the most vulnerable people. And it doesn't matter to me who takes care of them as long as someone takes care of them. So we do need to reform the system and we do need to identify other resources. In the meantime, things are moving as slow as molasses because of COVID, slower than I ever imagined anything. And I just, I think we need to take all of that into consideration. I think those are good points to make right now and the heat of the conversation. I definitely hear Stephanie's points, Commissioner Sweeno's point about waiting for the RFP. I would have pushed back for that a month ago. I would have said, you know, we're waiting. I've been talking about this RFP for almost seven months now, thinking that this was the answer to it and we weren't going to do anything until somebody comes in and assesses the situation. In talking with the experts and trying to find somebody that's competent to do the RFP talking with the consultants that we're looking at, they all really have a slimmer theme and I wanna share that with the group and that is no matter what, policing in general is all over, because I talked to people in Philadelphia, Albany, in Charleston, South Carolina. These issues are happening to every police department and as well, they should with regard to racial justice. So we're gonna have to pay attention to what we're doing. We're gonna have to think about doing it differently. They're happening, but an under-resourced business or police department or whatever you have will create more tension. And my fear is that that tension can create a backlash that we don't want here. So, you know, as much as my ears are red, thinking about having to have, you know to make these decisions right now, we put ourself in this place as a city. And so I just wanna urge everyone to think about this moment that we're in. Like, Stephanie say this all the time, this is the moment that we're in. You know, it's not exactly a safe moment and it's not a safe moment for black and brown people. And I do think that if we, you know further stress our resources, it will be an even more dangerous moment. And that's just my perspective. And I'm not an expert nor will I ever be. But I really just need to say that and I want folks to hear what I'm hearing from other police departments across the country. Cause no one, whether it be a racial audit or call volume, no one's saying, wow, you know, we just are so, you know we don't have anything to do here. You know, everyone is saying that they're strapped and everyone is trying to find new ways to do things. So I just really just want to, want to share that. It makes me feel better to, to, to share it because we're not different. We're not, we're not, we're not unique. And we definitely, I mean, people with the training, you know, people, you know, I would love to have more training. I'd love to have more training. You're never going to get training. You're never going to get, you're not going to be able to turn anyone that's bad over. You're never going to be able to get rid of anybody who is not good. Once the assessment comes in, suppose they come in and I, I, I definitely think that they will identify some issues and some problems that the police department will have to take up. And when that happens, I want to make sure that we have folks in place to take the place of people who need to go. So I just, I just wanted to share that with the group. Thanks. Thank you. Mila followed by Randall followed by Kyle. I just wanted to say that I really agreed with pretty much everything that councilor Saguino said. And so without repeating it all, I just strongly agree with a lot of things she said. I have been really triggered this week over the words politics and agenda. I mean, really triggered because I feel they get thrown around a lot to muddy the waters and to seek sometimes to devalue the issues at hand. So I would, I would also urge us to be very careful to avoid those words because they, they don't have the effect that some people think that they do. And especially the word agenda because I literally have had multiple conversations concerning a post that I did where I said agendas quite literally exist. They are, you know, governments have agendas. And if we look at our city or the city council has an agenda, you know, we have an agenda, we talk about the agendas. The city council talks about the agenda. This is what's on the agenda. Do we want to change the agenda? Do we want to put something off, add something? They vote on agendas. I mean, the agendas are there. So the way people throw away around agendas and politics, it's if people don't like agendas and they vote for new representation and to try to give these... I just think they muddy the waters and they try to distract from the issue. And I just hate the use of those words because I really don't feel that politics should be part of this at all other than fact that recognizing that people vote for new representation when they feel that things that they need in their community are not being properly represented, I guess, and I'll just leave it there. I guess I'd really like to... I think the question earlier about having more data about the overnight incidents, I think that's really important to have. And I just really... I mean, once we get the formal contract sign and have a conversation about how long is this going to take? Because I'm really all about waiting for that RFP. I do support CSOs and CSLs. I definitely was very impressed with Casey. I was very impressed also with the independence that she had, which I thought was really important because I know there's been... There was a concern about how much independence would a position like that had. And she definitely demonstrated and gave some very, very specific examples, showing that the type of work that she can get done, which is good work, and that she had the independence to make crucial decisions around her position and the people that she would help. So conceptually, I would definitely support those positions and possibly getting some more people in the positions that can help with certain parts of populations that we could possibly have our police officers less involved in. And that is all I have for now. Thank you. Thank you, Mila. Randall, follow up, Kyle. Yeah, thanks. I just want to respond really quickly to a couple of points that Stephanie made. Yes, look, I do not intend to substitute the voice of this commission for the judgment of the consultants on the line. I don't think that we should think of ourselves as setting a kind of long-term target or goal for what the head count of BPD should be. The question I think is just with respect to this current proposal, which is on the table, do we want to endorse this particular proposal for this contemporary head count going forward? And part of the reason why I think that the answer to that should be yes, although like I said, we might wonder about the numbers, but whether it's 84, another number, but part of the reason why I think the answer is yes, is because I think that if that head count had been set differently in the initial resolution, we would not be in this place. And I'm not sure that the way that that number was set initially was set with an eye towards what the consequences would be. And so that is, and part of the reason because the police commission was not really consulted on that. It was not brought to us to look at it. It was not brought to us to evaluate what the consequences would be about how policing happened with that particular head count going forward. But I think that having that kind of temporary head count be higher than it is right now for, until we figure out how exactly the revisionist police probably going forward is I think an appropriate thing to do. And so I think that this is a bit of a sense. So my suggestion is that we recommend that that head count be kind of temporarily increased in order to allow for, you know, kind of get the ball rolling on some of these hires so that midnight shift is not lost. Like I'm not an elected official, so I'm not speaking for the city. And it's not my capacity to make judgments about what's best for the city. If the city wants to lose midnight coverage, you know, that's the city's, that's the, that is the prerogative of the elected officials not made. But if someone were asking me, you know, would you recommend that that happened? I would say I recommend that it not happen. And that is even given that I think that there are still ways that I can say that we can revision how policing works, but I would still say I'll recommend that that not happen. So that's why I am kind of like I said, in favor right now of both of those proposals that are on the table, subject to perhaps some modification on what the numbers are. Thank you, Randall. Kyle followed by myself. Thank you, Chair Gommash. Oh, I also want to address some comments that Stephanie made. First thing is I want to stand corrected semantically. I think that what I was meaning to say is that it strikes me that we are being driven in this moment in making decisions based on circumstances. There are circumstances that are currently here and part of the work is to make it such that the circumstances are different. And so I was just encouraging us to think about how might we think about numbers and what we believe about the police force and how we want it to look under very different circumstances. And I made the error of conflating things because hopefully everyone appreciate it here. I do think there are lots of days in my job where I do think I'm dealing with politics and agendas and that's not meant to be derisive. That's fact. Oftentimes there are very, I would argue that getting 150 people to call on them public comment to say the same thing with the script is smart politics. It was good, it was well done. Bravo, that's a savvy, but it's politics, I would argue. And that is what it is. So I did because we got a lot going on all the time. I conflated there, but in this circumstance what I really wanted to talk about was circumstances. There are circumstances as a release to the BIPOC community, et cetera. And just for example, I don't know the data. Stephanie might know better chief or DC Sullivan or Breck. I don't know on calls and the number of responses that BPD does, but I would guess based on my work that less than 50% of calls involve BIPOC people at all. There's a whole piece of work that BPD does that doesn't even deal with BIPOC issues but BIPOC issues are driving what we're doing now, overwhelmingly so. And I'm not arguing it's not rightfully so, but that's just a fact, right? There's a whole piece of work that the BPD is doing that also probably deserves scrutiny and being looked at. But I think everything is being driven mental health. I would imagine that our mental health calls, there's a conflation, probably is relatively little to do with BIPOC folks. And we talk about mental health, but we talk about, you know, limiting the aggressiveness and the use of force and mental health and social workers. I'm not sure all those things are always, they're all important, but I'm not sure they're always precise. So that's one thing. But lastly, I do want to say, because I think Professor Sagrino brings up something. I was thinking today, the reality just straight up is the lag time and the Academy, et cetera, strikes me and it seems like Commissioner Harp and Commissioner Durfee is saying is a crisis. I, as just logic, the pressure on police, the scrutiny is going to continue. I think there are a number of people who enter the profession under different circumstances. I think it's going to be uncomfortable. I think people will leave. One could say, we want them to leave. Let's take it that. Let's say people are leaving, we want them to leave. That still doesn't help the backfill. Right now, we could eliminate the cap, say there's no cap. Chief, do what you want to do. He would have a hard time keeping it at 80. He might have a hard time keeping it at 75 because of the other factors. I don't, you know, DC, the assistant chiefs and chief has there ever been a class where BPD can put 20 people in the Academy of Time? That's a small number. He gets six to 10 spots, right? And the attrition is probably 50% a lot of the time. So each class, so we can only be getting police into, we're going to be in trouble. It could be four, five, six years to get the numbers with attrition to get up. And it seems to me the attrition will continue. So it seems to me there are separate things. I'm not saying so much about the 74 and 84 is that 74 is not really 74 with the forecast that seems really reasonable if that's going to happen. That the numbers are probably going to go down. And the desire, I would argue, we're probably going to be in the paper if you Google Burlington is going to be messy for a while. It's not going to be the easiest place to recruit to. And it's hard to fill the ranks. And we get ourselves together and then we say, go for it in June or whenever. And we're just that much further behind the eight ball. And if we care to fill the coffers, it's just, that's math. My comment here is just pure math. The math seems to be very much not in our favor. And that we need to do something now for right now, we're looking at, what was it again, like May 2022 or something like that, right? So the Academy class and so the, we're now hiring to get someone on the road for May 2022. And that might be because of the Academy that could be three or four people. That can only be three or four people with a lot of work and a lot of time, a lot of money. And that might be three or four people backfilling a force that at that time is down to 58, 55, right? So that's what I'm weighing in to look at that because I've been very impressed by the apparent dire situation that's presenting. Because 74, 76 is the problem, but it seems like most people would agree 55 is a very different situation we have in Burlington that is growing, a community that's growing. We're going to be more dynamic, more challenging. People are coming here, if we do our job, right? The community is going to grow. So that's, I just, that's where I'm trying to come at it from. Awesome, thank you. So we'll click on the table. There's essentially two things that to, you know, agree and recommend moving forward. I think the easier the two things to vote on right now would be conceptual approval of the CSO CSL plan. I will entertain a motion to accept that part of the plan. Anyone else want to do a discussion on that or play? Sorry, actually, before I do that, I do have a question and we don't have a council here. See how it's only six of us in the event of a three, three split, does that go as does not pass? I'm getting some tentative shaking of heads. It would not pass. That's correct, it needs to be majority. Majority, and so we still need four people to approve something, even though we only have six, correct? Okay, so I just wanted to clarify that. I guess before I make a motion to accept this, to move forward with the CSO CSL plan, I'm thinking that's probably the easier one of the two to move forward with right now at this point in time. Any conversation on that? I just have a quick clarifying question. So just, we're talking about what we're doing here is we're really just making a recommendation to council. Correct. Okay, and a yes has is two thirds majority or just majority? Same majority. Okay, thank you. Randall. Yeah, thanks. I just want to make sure I can understand what the component is that's being discussed or voted on right now. So I understand kind of supporting the CSO slash CSL plan as something like, encouraging the council slash BPD to build up non-sworn resources as much as possible, including the kind of proposed positions of CSO and CSL and work to incorporate them into the function of BPD or work to find ways to have them augment the services that BPD provides. So I mean, that's the one I'm understanding the plan to be. It's not necessarily setting any concrete numbers for how many CSO or CSL is to hire. It's nothing to like that. It's just saying we want to encourage the continued, we want to encourage non-sworn resources to be developed right now. We want to find ways to incorporate them into the proper function of BPD, is that right? Yes, you explained it much better than I did, but yes, ideally. And I'm happy to move that we endorse the development of non-sworn resources to help augment the function of BPD. Sure, he seconds that. Any discussion? All in favor of the motion on the floor, raise your hand to say aye. Aye. Aye. That passes unanimously. And for the other recommendation that they're asking for, moving from a cap of 74 to 84. Before we entertain any motion like that, I think we need to further discuss this one before moving forward. I see Stephanie's hand raised. Oh, Stephanie, we cannot hear, I'm sorry. I wanted to respond to the comment that Kyle made. And I think he makes a really persuasive argument and literally had me thinking, maybe I should vote differently on this. But then I step back and I look at the call demand that we've seen. And although there may be fewer officers, there's also fewer, there's less demand. And in the most serious crimes that require a lot of resources, those are rare events. And so I just wanna, I wanna just say that we have to look at both sides of that. We can't look just at one side of that. Thank you. Karen, followed by Rando, followed by T.C. Sullivan. And speaking of both sides, I did wanna mention this earlier. The data that you presented, Professor Suwino, it does say, it does point to a decrease, but how much should we decrease it? That's the point, that's the part of looking at that data that I'm not able to, and again, this is why we're hiring a consultancy because they're certainly not relying on me. But I'm not able to say to the constituency that we serve that I know what to do based on that. I can't say how many, I can't say four, I can't say five. And I also just would project, I would just say for the last time because I am not gonna keep talking, but this is not a normal time. I have gone back and forth with this myself. I don't, I'm so stingy when it comes to resources right now. That's my family, that's my boss. And it's just not a normal time. So that's why I'm feeling a little bit more conservative with my view, it seems like a time we should be protecting and holding each other. And I know that you know that, Professor Suwino, and I know that that's who you are. But that's why I struggled with it. And I just wanted to say that, you know, as your colleague and as someone who really respects your work. Thanks. Randall followed by DC Sullivan. Yeah, thanks. I mean, I have two points there, I guess. So the first is unless the data say that there is no need for midnight coverage, then I worry that the data are being misinterpreted. So again, you can point to indexes of number of calls per officer as much as you want, but unless the data say that there's no need for midnight coverage, I worry that they are being misinterpreted. The second point is I do worry about kind of number of calls as a useful metric for the following reason. Look, I mean, there are plenty of departments in which officer effectiveness is basically measured in terms of how many, let's say traffic stops they make. And that's not gonna be a good use of resources to say like I think you're a good officer if you're out working and out working means just pulling over as many cars as you can. That's not what we want out of policing. So since that's not what we want out of policing, we shouldn't be kind of incentivized in this look of like you need more calls in order to justify this number of officers. We want the officers for the task that we think that they should be performing. And that's why I worry that just kind of looking at, because I mean, look, I joined the police commission, I don't know, almost three years ago, I was also encouraging like we ought not be doing sending officers on various types of stops, it's not necessary. And so some of those calls have gone down as Chief Mayor was saying. I don't take that as a sign that all of a sudden these officers aren't needed. That's the sign that they're no longer doing the things that they shouldn't be doing. So yeah, that's all I've got. I think I saw T.C. Selbin's hand raised. Go away, John. I was just gonna add, although the more serious calls are certainly from a sheer percentage point, much lower percentage of our total call volume, I would add that they require much more resources in order to ensure or at least hopefully ensure a more positive outcome in those events. And if you under-resource those incidents, the likelihood of an adverse outcome goes up much more than a well-resourced incident. And so that is a gamble that is highly unpredictable. And I just wanna throw that out there as far as looking at the numbers. Chief Mayor, do you want to comment on something? I just wanted to repeat and reinforce something that Randall talked about again. From 2015 to 2019, 61.2% of the decrease is entirely attributable to the decrease in traffic stops. And that was discretionary. That was a conscious decision on the part, largely of Chief Del Pozo, to say we don't want these kinds of stops anymore. And to back around, and he had long discussions I know with Commissioner Harp about that, about the necessity for those kinds of activities. When officers don't have anything to do and they're encouraged to do traffic stops or even just not discouraged from doing traffic stops, that's what they do when there aren't other calls. And you end up with a certain amount of activity that is ancillary to the core mission, but has a public safety role and does in fact have an important role to play. I believe certainly it's got a role to play with certain parts of our community constituency in making them feel that police are out there doing something. We get more complaints at NPAs about traffic issues, about the fact that the stop sign at Mansfield and is it Pearl at that point or is it Colchester at that point, is constantly run that the, that is what people complain about at NPAs. And so back when officers did that, that was a mechanism. You don't have anything to do, pull a car over lawfully if it's committed an infraction and it's a quick in and out. Sometimes you write a ticket, sometimes you give a warning, but we made a conscious effort in this department to stop doing that. The chief made it very clear to officers and they got the message to stop doing that. And we're now being held accountable for not having the call volume that's largely predicated at 61% on that choice, which again was driven largely by Chief Dalposo's reactions to Professor Saguino's work. So that is one aspect. And then the other aspect with regard to important calls, high crisis calls, I would go to what Director Dodson talked about. We accept that we have firefighters. The double fatality fire was the first since 2012. That is not an argument not to have fire departments. Thank you, Director Dodson. Hopefully two quick points. I appreciate Dr. Saguino's continuing to point to the supply demand, but I just wanna be a little bit more, make a put a fine point on it. It seems like we're talking about 74 and what I'm arguing that we consider is that we're not a 74 conversation at all anymore because there's not very much evidence to suggest we can stop at 74. The attrition that's going to happen seems like it will move through 74. And as we move through 74, are we saying we don't need police, let's not 74 and let's not say 80 where we're at now. Do we not need officers at 65 and 60 because it does not strike me that's unreasonable. That's what I'm encouraging us to think about, not 74, but the place we will get to before the many, many years it takes to refill. And are we comfortable saying we don't need officers at that point because I would argue that's really what we're facing now because that train has left the station, there was no stopping that train. That train is going. And I would continue to argue it will go. And so when we make our decision, let's not be caught on 74 because I don't really think in terms of the three to five year forecast for our department, it's not a 74 question. So I'll put that and then back to an interesting insight that's been talked about. I just want to put a fine point out that I've learned from in the building. The counterintuitive nature of the number of cops done well. When they're doing their job well, it is indeed more cops that allow for a more controlled situation, less harm, less escalation of force. At the macro level, it's very clear, look what happened on the Capitol. If we had eight times the cops, we would have had a lot less. The crowds would have looked at it and said, uh-oh, cops with full riot gear, full on everything. People would have been a little more chastened. But they looked at it like, we think we can overcome this force. We can make this happen. On the micro level, the video I watched the other day, this young man, as I can remember, I told you, I know the young man, played football at my kid, 220 pounds, you look in the video, he was in a tough place. He seemed to me, completely prepared to assault the cop. He did not seem to have any concerns about doing what he needed to do to assert his innocence, et cetera. One cop with that, my sense, I don't know what sort of martial arts or what those cops had, this guy would overpower. And this kid's a 220 pound, 19 year old, full of testosterone young man, amped up. And I don't think either of the cops that were there was a measure of one-on-one hand-to-hand combat. And so that could have very easily escalated to that cop doing what they felt they needed to do to provide their safety. Because if that kid came after him, it would have been a thing. By the time that was done, I don't know, five, six, seven, there were a decent number of officers there. And by the time it got done, it was calm. I don't think they hurt the kid. They weren't throwing them around. They weren't roughing them up. They weren't billy clubbing them. They weren't kneeing him. It was calm. And so that's counterintuitive. Before I worked in the station, I would go by and be like, why are all those darn cruisers there? Why are all those cops there? But now I understand that there are times when that is exactly how safety is provided because you have multiple people who can do the multiple things that a scene requires. And once again, that can be done poorly. But when it's done well, it is, I would argue good police work, that the numbers actually help things to stay calm, everything to get managed. And I just think that's part of the calculus. Is that a hand raised, Stephanie? Yep. Okay, Stephanie. You haven't had a chance to speak, but maybe let me offer this. I think we're not all in the same place on this. And let me propose a compromise motion. And that is we approve the increase of officers from 74 to 80. I was honestly kind of something similar to that. And I guess, sorry, before I jump into Shireen, I have a quick clarifying question and I think anyone else's answer, please, please jump in. We've reduced the cap to swan to 74, right? That's the way they want to get to. Oh, listen, another charter, right? If we drop below that number, are you allowed to hire to get back to that number? Or is there still a hiring freeze even if you drop below 74? My understanding is that I could then immediately begin attempting to hire one officer, two officers, three officers. But I have to wait for it to get to 74 and I can only allot myself as many officers as we are at. So we drop below 74, I hire one. And in the meantime, we end up dropping much farther and then I can initiate some additional hiring practices. But if I time them depending on how they're timed, do they get to an academy or not? I don't know. And I think that what Directive Dodson talked about is incredibly important here. He said it and for the first time, I really understand it. This isn't an argument about 74. That's gone. Train is less the station, it was a terrific statement. This is an argument about 68 and 64 and 50. Thank you. Shari, I saw your hand raised. Was that it for a question, comment or? I had a question for the chief on how, why he asked for the 84 specifically. The rationale for that 84 is that it is 5.6, above 78. 78 is what is prescribed in the plan that I put together. And I want to be clear. I put this plan together in the summertime. I shared it with Deputy Chief LeBreck and with Deputy Chief Sullivan. I shared it with the mayor by the end of the summer. It has been honed. It has absolutely had input additional from Director Dodson, from the mayor, from others. But the notion of saying, can we replace some of these services with CSOs and CSLs has existed since the summer. My initial plan didn't include a midnight. I just gave up on the idea of a midnight for the city at all. And I got us to 68 sworn officers with the ability to still have the resources Burlingtonians expect, such as a DBPO and a CAO, but and call volume response during the day, but replacing some call volume with the CSO position, but no midnight's. That would be 68, which is a little under and 68 with a 74 permission would be the kind of buffer that we're normally accustomed to having. But the mayor was insistent that there had to be a midnight in it to his credit. And so I redrafted the proposal sometime in late September in order to include a midnight. And that brought us up from 74 to 78. And that is the 78 to be at the 78. We talk about that target head count. That's the rationale for the eight and four. So I see Randall's hand followed by a cop. Yeah. No, I was just going to comment that if I'm reading the, if I'm reading the graphs right from January 1, 2013 until July 1, 2018, where the head count was at 100, it seems as though the average actual staffing level for BPD was 97. And so, you know, sometimes it ranged between 94 and 99 as far as I can tell. So it seems though the average that it was below the head count number was about three. I mean, just for that reason alone, I would actually worry about trying to set, you know, making the compromise proposal would be 80 if the goal is to have a kind of an act based on actual head count of 78 with, you know, with USB staffing 48. So I would worry that, you know, even just looking at historical trends, setting it kind of two above what seems to be a minimal number is setting it too low. It might be that 81 or 82 or 83, you know, if we want to kind of want to go below the number of 84, but I would just worry that, I mean, so I worry that unless I understand the motivation behind 80, I worry that that number is not kind of consistent with what seems to me to be the demands of, I said, you know, again, if the goal is keeping something like a mid night shift. Okay. I'm just, I hope it is received that I'm just trying to bring in as many angles and dimensions so that we can make the best decision. And one that is part of the conversation I'm privy to that I think needs to be added to this is the issue of leadership and supervision. So, and these comments, I hope when I think about this, I think about, okay, if back to my issue about circumstances, if we change the circumstances, if you were alive and we said, hey, Peter Drucker, management guru, come in here and talk to us about what you understand about management science, how do we build a really good police force? I can only imagine that part of that is about supervision and who reports to who, and back to Randall's comment, how those people feel about their job, they're not the leaguer, they're not overburned, all these things strike me as just organizational development 101. And so, understandably, the people who are in a position to retire are stacked at the top. So it could be that he said he wasn't, but in this next year, we could lose these two deputies, we could lose several lieutenants, those are the people who have the time. And it makes sense to me that if we're trying to have the best police force, you can't manufacture experience. So there's this like bifurcated thing. There's a lot of young people, some old people, and the middle isn't as strong. So recently, I understood that where DC Solvon talks about it, we just promoted a person to sergeant who is a really competent person, but they're young and they're relatively green. It just says the fact. And DC Solvon says there wasn't a time when you had X number of years before you'd be that from a sense of experience, and now you have far fewer years. So we could deplete the ranks of leadership and then be forced to do promotions because you have to have leaders, particularly if we want to have a good organization, and then you create this funky situation about incentive, because now you have someone in leadership, which is the more money, more responsibility, but they're there younger, so they're there longer. So then the younger officers are like, well, why would I stick around because I want to advance, I'm ambitious, but that seats not likely to open. So, and it creates this funky dynamic. And I think that's part of this. There's no control over who leaves, but once again, from a intuitively, that the people who are in a position to, in terms of the years and what DC Solvon talked about about how the retirement system works, those are those people. And once again, if we got laterals, I would think we would want more experienced officers, but because of the pension system, we don't have a state pension, it's municipal. So people, there's significant pension implications of doing a lateral in state and probably out of state too. And so officers are thinking about that. They're like, hey, I got 13 years, 12 years, 10 years, the kind of amount of time it takes to learn the streets and learn the tactics and get your cool and do some things. And those people aren't the people who are most likely to leave for other dynamics. And it just strikes me that all these things should be considered. The leadership vacuum would be a massive problem for a city that wants to build the best police force to have everyone be young and green and gung ho and all the things that go along with that. And it hadn't been brought into this conversation tonight and I've been made privy to it. So it seemed like perhaps it could be helpful as people deliberate the likelihood that leadership will be the first people to go. Thank you. Let me just actually, it's a quick correction about my math. I think I got my math a little bit off from the eyeballing. I think it might be about 3.4. So I think on average between January 1, 2013 and July 1, 2018, when the headcount cap was 100, the average was about 3.4 below 100, I believe. Thank you. All right. So moving forward, Stephanie, I believe said before, I don't know if that was a proper putting a motion for 80. If that is, is there a second? I'm gonna second it. We have a second, open for deliberation. Randall. Yeah, I guess so. Just on the basis of my, because the number we should be looking at before we get the results of the consultant, et cetera, that we should just be saying, we want to keep things at the kind of bare minimum level of the department functioning right now, and because my concern is that 80 is not kind of allowing for sworn officers to be at 78, which seems to me to be the kind of minimal number which is being suggested, I would recommend that that number be set to 82. So I'd either move to amend it to 82 or I'll just vote no on the current proposal. Do you have any for the discussion on that? I'll say at least 82, by the way. But I mean, I don't know whether it's, I'm not sure about the precise numbers, but yeah. Are you amending the motion? Can you do that? That's a good question. Yeah, I guess I'll move to amend the motion so that it is 82 rather than 80. Second. Seconded by Shareen. Stephanie, we can't hear you. It's offering a friendly amendment. So it's up to me to accept or not. Oh, yeah, sorry. Sorry, I would have counsel here. So I actually don't know for these little questions here, my apologies. No worries. If I didn't know whether it needed a second, I'd know whether it was a friendly amendment or not. So I'll let you decide. Yeah, I know. I don't wanna be in this position. Just like, show me your heads. Are you all thinking that we should go higher than 80? We're folks at, yeah. How about if we amend it to 81? I would just say get so high. Sorry. I'm just saying my worry is just that, and I said, I'm just trying to work with the numbers that I've got. And I just worry that, I'm not trying to make a compromise with people. I'm trying to make a compromise with the situation that we're in. So if the goal is to have 78, then I would wanna know why do we think that 81 would allow us to stay at 78 given that the historical trend is that it's over three below the head count and given that we're also kind of on this down. There's a sharp decline in demand for service. I think that is not too far to go. Again, like I said, I just don't think it's linear. I mean, we've had that discussion right, but I just think that if it is below 48 sworn, then you don't get to 0.99 anymore. You're at zero again, like there's a step there. And I think that you're not accounting for the step. So I think, sorry, I'm DC seller. I think we have to keep debating amongst ourselves. I think, here's what I'm gonna propose as a motion that we approve up to 82 officers under the condition that the police commission be part of the interview process to ensure that culturally confident police officers are hired. How's that? I'd support that. The only concern with that is we can't ensure that they are hired, we just can't ensure that that will happen in the saplicant pool. So I don't know. I think that we don't hire if we can't find people who in fact meet that qualification, we don't hire. Man, I just got back from, didn't get back from anywhere, but I went to a conference in which I saw a really interesting research paper that looks at use of force by officers. And what they found was that white officers, black officers, let me put it this way, white officers use force twice as often in white neighborhoods as black police officers and four times as much in black neighborhoods compared to black officers. You know, I see research of this kind, numerous places, and I think it behooves us to condition any new officers on making progress on hiring a more diverse workforce. I just want to jump in. Go ahead. I just want to jump in before I think I saw Randall's hand and also Karen. So if we hypothetically speaking, let's say we do vote on this, we approve it, goes to council, and they're in hypothetically speaking, they're like almost up to 82. We stub the RFP out, let's say hypothetically, we get that back in end of May, June. And so let's say the police are there but they get the ball rolling on this hiring stuff, or at least getting applicants for the next academy in August, the RFP comes back in, you know what I said, May, June, and it says, you know what? It needs to be less than that, you know? And so I guess what I'm saying is that like, I think we can approve saying like, I think we have 80, 82, 84, whatever, knowing that when the RFP comes back, it's gonna shift, you know? So I don't necessarily see a problem with 80 or 82 or whatever number for them to at least so much as like start getting, I guess applicants lined up for whatever happens in the future, I don't know. That's what kind of makes sense to me. I'm happy to clarify that further if people want, but does that kind of make any sense at all? I don't know. I mean, I think what you're saying is that, you know, if the RFP comes back recommending a lower number, then we're at a pickle. But I think what it just means is it's gonna take us longer to achieve the attrition that we were looking for. And maybe that's the right cost to play to ensure that we don't have too few police officers. I think that's really, we're not gonna hit it, you know, we just don't have enough information to hit it right on the money. And I think, you know, what I hear from Randall and others is we should err on the side of caution. And it simply will mean a longer period of time to get down to the size police force if that's what the RFP recommends. And I could live with that. I think I saw Randall's hand raised followed by Landon and if I missed anybody, I'm sorry. Thanks, I mean, I've kind of lost a little bit of track of what exactly is being debated discussed right now. I'll just say one, I mean, I think that the question of whether or not, what role the police commission plays in hiring decisions, I think ought to be independent of the recommendation that we make to city council. But I think that's something that we can very easily kind of advocate for slash, you know, work out with the chiefs who are present. Now, I don't think that there would be kind of, you know, any concern about involving, having greater insight into that hire, having greater input into the hiring decisions. I mean, I kind of worry that the suggestion is that there's a huge number of fantastic minority applicants who the city is just not hiring because of kind of lack of desire. I think that's just not the case, but I mean, but I don't think there's any problem with having kind of increased, you know, input in that. And I don't think that's something which would need to be kind of conditioned with whatever suggestion we make to city council. So I think that kind of our recommendation that city council should just be like, again, and I would be happy with making very, very explicit in our recommendation that this is not intended to set kind of long-term staffing decisions for the department, but that is still gonna be dependent. You know, that's gonna be conditional on the results of the process, which everyone's agreed to, the consultant, et cetera. And this is just kind of what we think needs to be done in the immediate case, given that there are kind of there are conditions looming, perhaps unavoidable, which will kind of drastically change the way the kind of the nature of services that BPD can provide. And it's not clear to us, it's not clear to me that that was the purpose of the initial decision to set the head count at this level. Landon, I saw your hand raised. Yeah, I just had a question for Chief Mirad. How do you feel like the room is right now? You say that people in the state are laterally not likely to obviously go here. So would you see this process taking a long time? How long do you think you'll take to get applicants? I think that we will be fortunate if we can find three to four applicants for an August class, if an August class happens, if we are permitted. And then I think that, but in the meantime, before we get to that August class, we will lose between six and 10 people to a combination of departures and retirements. And then from there forward, I think that we will probably be in a position where we, in every six month period, hire and actually get through the academy, three people as we lose four and two people as we lose three and four people as we lose six and ever on. And we will continue to get smaller in the meantime until we have an equilibrium where we could actually get a single large class in. The last time this agency faced a similar situation, it was the late nineties and there were a couple of very large classes that came in. But there was a period prior to that where they purposely bought out people and let it get smaller. And the primary rationale for that was the creation of our current schedule and the community policing model of operating in different parts of the city and areas. Which by the way, you heard it, you didn't realize you were hearing it, but when Deputy Chief Sullivan talks with great passion and huge knowledge about Syria, because that's where he was and that's where he was the leader and that's what he knew. And that's the nature of an area-centered community policing model. You dig in and you'd think that an 18 square mile city with 44,000 people, you should be able to get the whole thing, but it's not. It's D.C. Sullivan knows C and D.C. Lebrek knows E. And so that is the nature of it. That reorganization required a de-staffing and then very large, they were able to get a couple large classes in a row in order to get people in. How that happens here, I'm not certain. When that happens for us, also I'm not certain. But what I will say is this, that even the ability to start trying to hire for a putative August class is a sign to this agency that all is not lost and that there is a future and we're moving forward into it. Randall. Yeah, thanks. This is actually a question because I worry that I'm also speaking without having full understanding of the situation. So we're currently at 81, is that correct? This question's for Chief. We are currently at 84 actual, but we are at 79 effective. So of those four, excuse me, of the people in that number, there are some who are not effective. They're not deployable because they're not here. And then not 84, I apologize, 83. We are 83 actual. So let me keep that in question. Let me actually correct that further. There's, you know, the retirement of the officer who just retired, he'll be on our books for another couple of weeks. We had an officer retire back in, he put his papers in in, I guess, October, November. He too is on our books. He will never work in the building again, but I think he's on the books until February something. So I don't want to lie to you. I don't want to seem like I'm misrepresenting when I say 83. No, I understood. Actually, I mean, let me ask what I take to be a more relevant question, which is if the department wanted to, you know, with an eye towards the future losses that are coming down the pipe, if the department were to try to get three new applicants in the August Academy, excuse me, what would the head count number need to be at right now or by March? I'm sorry, I don't understand. So I guess, so that is you cannot, you cannot hire until the head count drops below the mandated head counts. I correct? Correct, 74. And then is it that you can only make a number of offers based on how low, how far you are below the head count? Is that also correct? That is what I understand. I cannot make offers beyond that amount. I could gamble a little bit and make, remember I don't actually put them on my payroll until they're about to start the police academy. So I could gamble and have two or three people that I'm leading through a process, even though I know I'm only allowed to have one. And I could gamble that by the time it comes to actually sign something on a dotted line and pay them that I'll actually be in a position to need all three. But that is not fair to people. And it's dishonest. Understood. So I'll just ask the last question I see DC7 as a hand up. I'll ask this last question. So just so I can get a little bit more clarity. So if the goal were to have three hires at the academy in August, what would the mandated head count need to be right now for you to make essentially three offers for August? 71. Offers for March? 71. And right now it's 74. No, right now it is 83. Right, I'm sorry. So what would need to be the level that you're allowed to have? I don't quite understand, I'm sorry. Yeah, no, I apologize. So the proposal is that the immediate increase of the sworn officer cap from 74 to 84 so that BPD can once again advertise for new recruit officers, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, in order to reach the 78 officer target. So the question is if the cap were increased from 74 to 84 immediately, would that allow you to offer three positions to officers for the August academy? Because I'm saying that the answer would be no. No, arguably that would allow me to currently, I mean right now, I'd only be able to get, technically I might only be able to get one. And again, depending on how flexible we are interpreting those two retirements who are still in my books, I might not be able to get any, but I feel that those are legitimately out of the picture already. And so I would certainly start to pursue a couple. And in that instance, I would make a very confident gamble being honest with any potential applicants through the entire process that I would be going for at least three, knowing that I would in fact drop well below 84. I would drop well below the 81 that would be required because I will be in the 70s, not effective. I will be actually in the 70s before August rolls around. And so I absolutely would be able to make offers to three people to, and the way it works is that after an initial look at the individual and some initial work, there is a preliminary offer made that it's not a guarantee of anything and it's predicated on additional steps being met. The testing that happens in the academy, the polygraph that happens, the background check that happens, being able to meet the testing again in order to get in. You have to do it at least twice. And so all of that is predicated on actually ever getting a paycheck from the city of Burlington. I understood. So just so I don't have to make any guesses here though. So I'm asking kind of what would be the number if not 84, which would allow you to confidently make, try to get three officers in the next academy class, August Academy class. I can't entirely say that. I mean, I don't know, 78 might get us to that. But again, and I understand partly what you're saying is that you're saying that these numbers, this is about getting some kind of consensus in this body so that you can make a recommendation to the city council. And frankly, I don't think these numbers will be the last numbers either. There's a certain amount of what we're talking about here that is not, we're not marrying ourselves to these because I'll tell you, I don't think that assessment is gonna say what some of the members of I think the joint committees think it's gonna say. I think an assessment's gonna come in and say you are woefully understaffed. And the fact is that if those numbers are liquid then in some level it doesn't really matter. What number could I, what number could we say that would allow me to actually try to put three into the hopper by March, well, not three into the hopper but to start working with three, try to identify three individuals right now, between now and March that we could legitimately begin to work in through a process. And there too, it's not three, it is 200 people that I need to look at in order to get those three. I don't know, I can't tell you. I guess, you know, 80, 82, 81, 78, I really don't know. At that point in getting to a certain amount of magical math and I'm trying to, I'm thinking in more terms that are a little bit more structural. I understand, and I see the last thing, DC self-analysis, not too in, but I just wanna be kind of clear because I said, I don't want to try to settle the long-term question about staffing levels here, right? So all I want to do is say like, look, it does seem to me as though there ought to be some step taken, we ought to recommend that some says to be taken to try to ameliorate what we see coming down the pipe, right? Which is all these departures and no way of getting new officers in for a period of time. And given that it's unlikely, we've got to make more than let's say three hires for the August class. Anyways, my question is like, what's the number that we can say if we can at least try to start stopping some of the flow and say we can at least get those three in and then we worry about the long-term numbers down the line. All right, that's it for me DC self-analysis. I mean, I'm sorry, I defer back to Chair Gommas. I think we've kind of veered off there a little bit. So I believe the motion on the table was, I think it was 80. I believe then Randall, I think I meant it to 82 and I think that's where we went out. So... But could I ask these some to weigh in if it was on this point, if it was relevant? Yeah, yes you can. Yes, it is to some extent. I can't tell you exactly what number it is because although on our books, we may have 83-ish, effective very shortly, we will have 79. I will say this is that we have had some discussion with the city attorney's office and my understanding is we can't even post for the job until we are below 74. We would have to alter the job posting to say that we do not have these positions currently, but if they become available, we would then be able to move you through the hiring process. But the idea is that because there are so many steps to that hiring process, ideally we would like to get some people in the hopper and start moving them through that process so that for an August Academy, we could possibly get some people into that Academy to stop or fill numbers back up to some extent. But then again, keep in mind, if we get three, the likelihood that we, well, three means we'll probably end up with one solo officer next spring out of those three. One will successfully succeed. Dr. Sardawson. This is just meant to be a pragmatic suggestion. What if what was done was to say that is there any rule against saying the cap is a moving cap? The cap for some period of time will be two more than the then effective number of officers. So when it's 83, the cap's 85. When it's 82, the cap's 84. That gives, while we're in a declining environment, which it seems like most people seem to accept when a declining environment, it allows the chief to hire, but it doesn't give them this number that can let them go anywhere. The number will be moving to account for the fact that things are going down, but at any given point, they can hire it and we're allowed right now for hiring to start. It seems like I hope everyone would think that starting a hiring process now because of the timeframe would be helpful. And so that's one idea that or 84 now, 80 in June, something that accounts for what's happening in terms of the decreasing numbers, but gives the latitude to my sense is we should be hiring, trying to hire new officers for the foreseeable future because it's gonna be so hard to do it. That seems to be pragmatically what we wanna do and the thing that we're allowed to do it because it does not seem had any risk of taking the numbers, certainly not before the assessment. It doesn't even have the numbers by the time the assessment gets back to us. Everything's, well, they're definitely gonna be smaller because people will only leave. No new officers will be added before the assessment's back and long after that. So just kind of getting pragmatic. There's a crisis, we're going to need officers. It seems like, it is hard, I would say once again from my experience when you talk with people who are in the business. So today, randomly, Anthony from the police department happens to know this guy, Carlton Myers, you guys might recognize. I don't think Anthony's new to the connection, but Carlton was one of the applicants for the proposal, he's in there and he and I talked about that. Anthony didn't know, he connected to me, I didn't realize, and it came up. But this is a BIPOC dude, he went to Vermont law school. He knows when he lived in Vermont for six years, he's in Illinois, dealing with Chicago, big city, big stuff, reform. He seemed really smart and qualified just back to Chief Miradz. In my conversations, BIPOC folks, white folks, anybody who understands law enforcement, I am not hearing that what's happening is that departments are significantly reducing staff. They're reallocating, they're training, they're doing all sorts of things, but the primary thing that people in the know are doing doesn't appear to be decreasing staffing. And so that's just, and I think we're suffering from expertise. And the only expert in these conversations is Chief Miradz and his colleagues. The rest of us are speculating and doing things that have absolutely no understanding of policing. And that's why we have the assessment, but it is interesting and to me problematic that we're making big decisions with zero expertise. And that's why we're waiting for the assessment, but the thing in June, which I also would agree, we got a little ahead of our skis, put us in a situation now where urgency is taking away some of the luxury we had to wait until the RFP happens because things are moving so quickly before the RFP, which took longer than it should have, comes into play. And we would prefer not to be here, but here we are. Yeah, thanks. First, I agree with the judgment, but I'll gently push back and then claim that there's zero of expertise. I am not an expert by any stretch of imagination. I'm not claiming to be one, but I think that this body has slightly more than zero expertise in these matters. But then it's, with respect to the proposal, I mean, that's a, you know, it's kind of a, sort of a psychotic, with respect to the proposal, I would certainly propose some, endorse something like a decreasing cap. You know, it is, you know, we propose it to be this right now, and then a number which is lower in three months, or numbers are lower than that in six months, for that to something which just says two more than where we're at, which, you know, not just for the optics of it, but just, I mean, that is a terrible, if you're just looking short term, that's a terrible thing to propose. So, I mean, but if there's confidence that, yeah, I mean, again, I think, I don't think that this body should be trying to prejudge what the results of the assessment would be, but I do think that this body ought to recommend that the department be able to hire, to try to hire right now, just because of the, what we see as the looming consequences. So, like I said, so I'm not trying to set anything like the, the cap on the department, what the, I'm not trying to establish what the department's action account should be when I make these numbers, I'm just trying to pick a number which allows the department to start making moves to start replacing the people they're about to leave. That's my only thinking about all of this. All right, back to the motion and the amendment at hand. So, made the amendment for 82. Do we, are we, I don't know how to accept that. I'm sorry, I don't know how to accept the amendment. So, I have to second it or, oh, sorry, we can't hear you. If it's a friendly amendment and I say yes, then you don't need to vote on it. It just changes the motion. Okay, so I've been amended to 82. Well, did you agree that it was a friendly amendment? So, okay, so it's on 82. Do I have a second? And then that's, Shereen seconds it. So, for deliberation, I have a quick thing to say. If we, sorry, you're in the dark and I can't quite, sorry, Shannon. None of us can hear you. I'm sorry. You did, Shannon. It's like Blair, which project or something? It says you're unmuted, but we can't hear you. I'm sorry. I think she was gonna answer my question on procedure. So, I'm gonna wait a second. What was the procedure question? Actually, wait, no, it was the question procedure. I was gonna say something else, then she was trying to, I'm sorry. I was gonna say, so, if, hypothetically speaking, if we do approve 82, how are we gonna go about, I guess, recommending that? Obviously, I think we should write something up. I don't have the best pen, or sorry, the most eloquent pen, personally. I guess who, in the event, I guess, if we approve it or not, we should still give it a, I think we should still turn to something saying why we need to do approve it, or why we don't approve it. So, I guess, who thinks I am? I am always at the service of the chair. So, if there's anything that you want me to do, I am willing to do it. That is not volunteering, that is to say, I'm always at your disposal. I mean, if we do approve it, I certainly think that it should be emphasized, again, like I said, the reasons why it is being approved, and again, the reason why I think it's just to kind of try to staunch some of the upcoming lawsuits to take us well below 74 very quickly. So, it's not, to make it clear, to clarify that it's not trying to establish a long-term number, it's just trying to allow for hiring because the number is gonna get below 74, 70 very soon. Does anyone want to volunteer to do this? If there's no volunteers, it shall be random. Not seeing any volunteers, so. And just, I guess, I think just so we're clear, I think, like I said, if we do approve an increase, and if we don't approve an increase, I think we should still send a memo to city council stating why for, why against, just so they know. Do I have to include that into the amendment? Sorry, into the motion, no. I see that, okay, so, I lost myself there. Stephie, do you want to restate the motions so we all know what we're voting on? The police commission recommends approval of the proposal to increase officers from 70 to 82, 74 to 82. And I believe, Shreya, did you second it before? Was that correct? Okay, voting on the motion, all in favor, say aye or raise your hand. Aye. Aye, all those not in favor? No. No. It's not, you have to do a roll call vote. Randall? Aye. Aye. Stephie? Aye. Shireen? Milo? No. Karen? Yes. And I'm also a yes. And you all is not present. All right, it is 9.54. I want to thank everyone for sticking with this and powering through. It's gonna be interesting path forward, but we will see what happens. So I guess moving forward then, if anyone has any, I guess, notes that they have from this meeting, but I guess if we had notes from this meeting, we can send those to Randall to summarize those into, into the memo. Is that my understanding of open meeting loss? Well, in any case, if we had notes or, and from his memory, he can include things in the memo. Can you, can y'all hear me now or no? Yes, we can. Oh, yay. I do apologize and that was a struggle and I can't turn my camera on. I, I hate to do this since this was just a vote on it, but I do need some clarification on the motion because the way that it's been stated to 82, the department is not able to still work on hiring, right? Because when we speak about effective officers, we are below that threshold, but technically the department is at 83 right now. And so until a couple of retirements in February drop and everything else, they still will not be able to hire. I just felt obligated to state, to say that. So that, yeah. No, thank you. I know. So again, I am willing to be correct on this point. It was my understanding that there was confidence that it would be below 82 in February and that's hiring could then proceed at that point, which would give a good chance of getting someone in for, you know, to cease to be declared in March in order to get people into the academy in August. Am I mistaken or is that correct? 82 effective, yes. 82, I can't tell you exactly when. I mean, we have a retirement that should happen on February 5th, but that individual may stick around a little bit longer than that. Again, we're already below 82 effective. Understood. Right. Right, I mean, again, I lacking any clearer direction about what that number should be and when. It seemed to me as though there was a chance with 82 of being able to do some hiring for August. So that's why I went with 82. And if that proves to be the wrong number then I wish I would have had some clear direction. Awesome. That's my assumption as well, Randall. I apologize if that's me who was supposed to give that clear, the clarity. I'm saying that we have 83, we are, and again, it's not 83, it's probably more like 85 if I count people who we are still paying as a city. But we are effective at 79 and we will be lower than that by September. I can't tell you exactly when that's gonna happen. The nature of this request is because all these movements are, they lurch and they come, again, an example is that Sergeant who just retired and they come out of nowhere but they are happening. And as the presentation demonstrated, we certainly know they're more coming. But I can't, when that officer will go to the VSP, yes, I believe that probably will happen before the March Academy class but I don't know exactly. And again, I don't know that that would bring us to, I don't think that will bring us to that head count that you're saying. I think we'll still be above that as far as who's on paper on our, who we have. Kyle, quickly, and then I'm going to adjourn this meeting because it is about to be 10 o'clock and most of y'all don't have bartending hours, so. Just to solve this, could the motion be amended to be an ability, the cap is the BPD has an ability to begin hiring at 82 effective. Cause effective can be verified. At any given point, the chief can point out why the effective is lower. So if it's 82 effective and we're at 79, then that means he can hire instead of it being 82 actual. If the cap is effective, make the cap number, make that 82 the effective and then that would allow hiring immediately because it's already below 82 effective but it's above 82 actual. So if you just make the cap an effective cap then it gives a latitude to hire, just suggestion. I think we're fine tuning this too much and the request was for 84 and we should, we just responded to that. The request was for 84 because I know that we're already at we're below 84 already. That is what gives me the flexibility to start trying to hire immediately. But everybody, but then there was, there was, you know argument about whether 84 was the right number. I'm sorry, I thought you said that we were at maybe 85 right now. Well, again, I think we may be at 86, but that's two people who have retired and are simply burning time that is accrued to them. I mean, yes, I take director Dodson's suggestion. I think that would require a new vote. So if someone wants to make that motion, they're welcome to, but I don't think that that can just easily amended based on the vote that's already been taken. Not hearing anything or anyone. With that, I believe our agenda has been fulfilled and I move to, I would just say, I mean, I'm sorry. I was about to motion to adjourn. So if you wanted to say anything before that. Yes, if you don't mind. Thank you. I apologize for coming off. No, I was just gonna say I do intend, except in whatever right up I make to city council to explain the rationale, what I take to be the rationale behind the vote. So it might be that, you know, then, that if it is judged that that rationale does not license the number that we picked, it might be this one wants to, city council wants to correct that rationale. I said, we're gonna make a recommendation anyways. We're not actually setting anything. So I intend to do that and that might solve the problem as it were. And then if more information can be given by the chiefs to city council to further clarify what they might need, I think, you know, the chiefs are welcome to do that. But that's what I, but, you know, I take my marching orders to be, to write up both the number 82 and the rationale behind why it was approved. Thank you. Awesome. With that, I motion to adjourn the meeting. I have a second from Karen and deliberations. Not seeing or hearing any and with all in favor of adjourning the meeting, raise your hand or say aye. Aye. Passes unanimously. You got to ask for no's, right? Oh, well, I want to say everyone said it. Oh, I didn't hear that one. Okay, I'm sorry. I heard you. Yeah, so that was unanimous. Thank you for being here for taking your time for this. And for the commissioners that have not got back me for rescheduling on the 19th, please do. And I will see you all very soon. Thank you.