 All right, my name is Olivier and I'm one of the person, my brother keeper program and I'm usually my friend who are like four of us and today I'm only going to be one, sadly. Yes, can you introduce yourself? Do you want me to introduce myself? Hi, I am John Murad. I'm the acting chief of police for Burlington, Vermont. My first question is, oh, so what do you do in your position? In my position, I get to lead the men and women of the Burlington Police Department. I get to work with terrific people, officers, sworn officers, dispatchers. We have community service officers who are unsworn, unarmed people. They're not like police officers who have law enforcement powers, but they do a lot of good work with the community. I have community support liaisons. Those are people who work, they do social work. They work in mental health. They work with people who don't have homes. They work with people who are suffering from substance use disorder. And I also have records keepers and I have people who do the kind of work that we see on TV shows like CSI, we call them ID technicians. There are a whole bunch of people in this police department who do a lot of different kinds of work around one shared mission. And that mission is very simply that we keep people safe by responding to and preventing crime and disorder with and for our neighbors. Oh, yeah, okay. My answer question is a lot of the things you guys do about community, like what is something like they're trying to progress like for, yeah, for like right now, something that focuses. So how are we trying to sort of work on the community aspect? You know, among the things we've done is we've created some of those positions that I just talked about. The community support liaison position, for example, is a way for us to connect with parts of the community that we weren't serving as well as we wanted to with police officers. And so we created a role that is unarmed and that doesn't have police enforcement powers but nevertheless works with police to help people who are suffering from mental health issues or who are experiencing houselessness. And that's a way another way that we try to connect is we're very transparent with our data and our information. There is a portal on the city website on which we publish all of our data. There are a number of different ways that you can look at how many activities police do, how many incidents we respond to, what kinds of crimes those incidents include. Every single use of force that police officers engage in is published on that site because use of force is a unfortunate reality of some type of police work but it has to be done in a way that's lawful and is in keeping with training and policy. And so every single time it happens we put together a narrative of it, a picture of who did it, who's involved in it, who was the subject of it, and we put that up online as a way of being transparent with the community and connecting with the community. Other kinds of things that we did in the past, community barbecues, creamy with a cop events, many of those have fallen by the wayside owing in part to the pandemic and in part to the fact that this agency was defunded for a period of time and we went from a relatively adequate head count of 105 authorized officers. Usually we had about 96 and we now have 69 officers and only 64 of them are actually available to work. So to go from 96 officers to 64 officers has made it much more difficult to do some of the connective things that we used to do with the community and that is not to anyone's benefit. It's not to our benefit with working with the community being servants of the community as best we can and it's not to the community's benefit either because we are missing some of those connections that allow us to be better peacekeepers and people who keep folks safe. How long have you been working in the opposition? I have been here with the Burlington Police Department since October of 2018 so just over three years. I was born in Burlington and I grew up out in Underhill. I went to Mount Mansfield Union High School. I left to go to college. I went to Harvard University. I then moved out to California. I then moved to New York for a while and was a cop and I was a cop in New York City for 12 years. I rose from police officer to assistant commissioner. I left the NYPD to go to the private sector for two years and although it was a lucrative job it wasn't a satisfying job not for me and so I took a 60% pay cut to come back to public service to join the Burlington Police Department when they advertised for a deputy chief job. I got to not only come back to public service but also come home to the city in which I was born. The county where my parents still live. I moved here with my wife and my two kids who are now in the public schools here in Burlington. We live in Burlington. I am incredibly privileged to get to serve this city every day and to get to work with the men and women who are inside this police department and to then be a part of this community. My other question is since you've been working for I think three years now I mean it's not that long so we're like one of the hardest yeah like in opposition like the hardest thing so far. So the hardest thing so far has absolutely been dealing with a very passionate cry for changes in policing that was implemented in a way that meant our police department got a lot smaller than it should be and so the murder of George Floyd, an utterly horrible, horrible event that was the catalyst for a national reckoning with issues that have bedeviled our country since before it was founded that have been with us since really Europeans first arrived on this continent 400 years and that murder caused a huge movement around the country that in Burlington saw a really unusually extreme reaction and that extreme reaction was a decision by our city council driven by hundreds of callers to say we want to defund the Burlington Police Department. We want it to be 30% smaller. That wasn't done with a lot of deliberation. It wasn't done with any kind of study or any kind of sense of is this going to work or what do we put in place instead and yet it was put in place and we then had to watch as the officer as the excuse me as the department got smaller and we were still getting calls from the public and we weren't able to answer them as well and I have worked with many others to build these new positions we talked about the community service officers, the community support liaisons to implement what we call a priority response model, all of these efforts to deal with the repercussions of that decision that was driven by such an important national moment and so that's by far been the largest challenge of my career here in Burlington. In New York I was an assistant commissioner at the same time as two officers were assassinated today actually seven years ago today two police officers named Raphael Ramos and Wenjin Lu were assassinated by a man who who claimed to be doing it on behalf of protesters around the killings of Eric Garner and of Michael Brown and Ferguson and there was then seven years ago a really big movement around police reform. This man he was not well he was a criminal he said he was acting on behalf of that movement he was not he murdered these two police officers and and that created a huge crisis in New York City that I dealt with here in Burlington dealing with this crisis thank god it does not involve any death it doesn't involve anybody hurt here in our city in that same way but it is it's been as stressful and certainly I was an assistant commissioner there which is a very high rank but not the top when you're at the top of an entity it's it's very stressful you are the person with whom the buck stops is the old expression the buck stops with me you're a person who has to make certain decisions you have a responsibility the people with whom you work and who you lead and you know I have a responsibility to my boss to the mayor and above him my my real boss the community to try to get it right and it has been a very challenging time to get things right so that's been the the sort of biggest thing that I've dealt with here in the course three years yeah I can answer questions like to be honest being a police like a hard hard job because you guys actually support us a lot and do you feel like the community I also support you guys more too so I I do so first of all I think the community supports us period I know that there was a time where certainly there was a lot there were many voices saying we're concerned about policing maybe we don't want policing to be the same as it is now we don't like the way policing has been done in the past both here and across the country but overall we have a very supportive community and and I think that a reason for that is that this agency while not perfect it is not a perfect agency has done a lot of things very very well and often before other places have this was the first police department in the state to adopt body cameras it was among the first to embrace community policing to work with street outreach so that it was talking about mental health in ways that weren't just about enforcement it created a system called iCat which is designed to talk to people in mental health crisis without using force we worked together with Mayor Weinberger on a program called Comstat which was directed at the opioid epidemic and had real success until the pandemic intervened and and took away the focus on opioids and we've seen opioids skyrocket since um there's a lot of things that this department has done well there are things that it needs to work on we continue to have racial disparity in our enforcement numbers and in our use of force numbers the question is where those disparities come from are those disparities that are caused by the officers are they caused by upstream sociological issues about who commits certain kinds of crime or disorder these are really complicated issues but this department hasn't shied away from tackling them and I think that that creates a system in which we have a community that's largely supportive of us I think over the past year that support hasn't always been as clear to the men and women inside the police department they have not felt that support as strongly as they used to and that is why some of them left we lost more than than 20 officers over the past 18 months and they weren't fired they left because they did not feel that sense of support they didn't feel valued by the community but I think that's it's wrong and I try to tell the officers with whom I work every day that they are valued by the community they're certainly valued by me I know they're valued by the mayor I know they're valued by the people that we serve and our neighbors for whom we work um but uh you know it is a tough job it's a tough job that has a an opportunity every day to make somebody's life better but conversely your actions can make people's lives you know worse too you can you can get things wrong and so those stakes are are very very important we ask a lot of our police officers I chose to become a police officer in part for a number of reasons but one part was that my brother is is a surgeon and I at the time was in Hollywood I was trying to be famous I was much younger and I looked at what my brother was doing and he was contributing he had a job that mattered he had a job that the stakes mattered if he messes up on his job there are consequences I didn't feel that way with what I was doing in California and then 9-11 happened and 9-11 also made me say you know what I was given a lot I was given a lot by my parents I was given a lot by my community I have certain skills and abilities that uh are a blessing and I owe it to my fellows to give that back as best I can that when we serve one another we are are are fulfilling a tab that came from from somewhere else uh and I think we all owe each other something we are all our each other's keeper right we are all our brother's keepers we are all our sister's keepers and that that's the lesson of that little piece of scripture it is the notion that that you know that yes we owe it to one another to take care of one another as best we can and so for me uh finding an opportunity to do that that involved going to New York um and ultimately becoming a police officer there because I felt that that was the best way that I could give back to the community I lived in yeah yeah that's very nice uh I had another question we also heard that like uh you don't really have to be come a police like to go you don't have to go to college to become a police officer like after high school you can go to training and become one of them so in my opinion I was wondering that don't you think like excuse me it sounds like being a police is a hard job don't you think like maybe they should get more education like so great question great question um and uh the the Burlington police department does not require a college degree but we do require um that people have a certain amount of we want them to have some college an associate's degree or equivalent or we want them to have military experience or other life experience that's commensurate and somehow gives them uh a little bit of that but even though we don't require it the majority of our employees do have college degrees about about 66 percent of our department right now has if I were with you I'd get you to the water myself um I don't want you to call um right now about 60 percent or 66 percent of our department has a college degree or more we have a number of officers who have master's degrees and other graduate degrees but most of our department has a college degree that's not true of the profession around the country many other departments don't have that the new york city police department which is by far the largest police department in the country has has new york city police department has 36 000 police officers burlington has 44 000 residents right so the new york city police department could could basically take over burlington tomorrow uh and just occupy the whole space in filadola but um of those 36 000 police officers only 33 percent have a college degree or higher uh everyone else you have to have either a military or an associate's degree there but you don't have to have a full bachelor's degree I think that getting an education brings a lot to the job I think that people who've gotten an education definitely bring things to the job I also don't want to foreclose on the idea that people who don't have a college education may have something to contribute and if you make a hard rule that says you know never I think you might limit yourself um and and that's especially true if you are trying to recruit from groups of people who haven't had the same access to college as others have right if you're excluding them then you might be cutting off your nose despite your face or in in thinking that you're you're cutting off your nose thinking that you're doing your face a favor and you're not uh so while I definitely prioritize college and I'm glad that this agency has a higher than than the national rate of college graduates I wouldn't say I want to prohibit it entirely taking somebody straight from high school absolutely not I would never do that in this agency uh you've got a you have to be 21 to be a police officer because you have to be able to enforce the law and do certain kinds of things but but b I just don't think the life experience is there and we're asking a lot of the people who do it I do however have some great roles uh we have roles in the summertime called beach and parkers uh we have used high school graduates for those and we also have these community service officer positions that I talked about and those do not require a bachelor's degree um uh we still probably wouldn't take somebody who's who's 18 but I'm not 100 sure actually I'm not certain that's true I think that if a candidate presented himself or herself and was 18 and was really uniquely qualified I think we wouldn't take that individual I don't think we are I don't think we have an age limit but um but those don't you know those are other opportunities to get into this profession in this department and be able to to experience what it's like and get to work with uh police officers and in the policing field and see how that fits in in your expectations uh oh wow that's all a question I have given question for me too well okay so uh I do have I just have some great questions uh with with regard to this this project you know what is it that you're seeking are you looking for like a unified sort of theory around how we take care of one another or are you just you know investigating really interesting jobs and ideas and learning what you can about those in order to become a more well-rounded person yourself uh honestly just like I feel like maybe the first of what you said first time just yeah to learn new stuff and like uh yeah and get them and share with the others too I'm like uh like me I didn't really know anything about like I've been learning a lot of new stuff that he know a lot just through like asking people questions yeah that's all with you yeah that's so that's really that's great so what now now what do you do what are you other than other than this program and getting to interview people and learn stuff that a lot of people your age don't get to do uh what's your uh what's your cup of tea are you uh are you an athlete yeah I play soccer I play soccer yeah yeah nice yeah yeah well thank you so much it was good talking to you hopefully we can do the the thing that we talked about earlier the ride along yeah yeah and if we can't if we can't make that ride along happen we can absolutely make a visit here and and talking with officers and getting to see the space and and maybe even kind of going out and seeing some of what the officers do we can make that possible yeah but a straight up ride along where you actually go on calls for service that that may give my city attorney a little bit of of of adjuta as they say so I have to see all right yeah thank you so much thank you