 Good afternoon everyone. Thank you for for joining us. For the last two years the number of police officers serving the city of Burlington has been a matter of major discussion and concern. Since early 2020 we've seen the number of officers drop from basically the mid 90s where it generally been for many years to our current number of 61 officers with 53 of those officers being available for deployment and that's what this first chart shows here. In this period of declining officers we have also seen some very concerning public safety trends. After years of nearly all crime metrics moving in the right direction this table summarizes some of the public safety challenges that we're currently facing if we can advance the next slide. So these are comparing 2022 year to date according to BPD statistics versus the five-year average. Public safety is a core responsibility of local government and turning these trends around especially gun violence is my highest priority right now and a focus of much of my time day in and day out these right now. In past press conferences over recent months we have talked about major investments the city is making to address these issues by creating additional public safety resources including adding social workers to the BPD team adding urban park rangers to the park staff and creating other CSO positions non-arm public safety personnel and more. However to fully address our current public safety challenges and ensure that this community continues to be one of the safest cities in the country we need to rebuild the department to the authorized headcount as soon as possible. Today's press conference is focused on communicating to the community to our current officers and to prospective officers how we intend to do that and to get back to a department with 85 sworn officers over the next three years and the next slide here shows what you know what that could look like there's a lot of of course it won't work out exactly like that but that trend of getting back to 85 officers three years from now is what this rebuilding plan is focused on. Again I make we're gonna we've talked about this some in the past people who have been following this discussion very closely will note that I think most of what we are communicating was part of our discussions with the city council over the last couple months but wanted to kind of pull this all together in one place and communicate it to everyone so everyone understands what we're attempting to do. I particularly see a few of our current and new officers here with us today I particularly want to be communicating this to current Burlington police officers who are right now working too hard we're asking too much from them there was too much over time too much pressure on the remaining number of officers after the declines we've seen the last three years. One bright spot in our current efforts is that we did just in the last couple weeks hire three new officers that are headed to the academy in August and the three of them are with us at the back of the room today and we we're grateful for your service and looking forward to I'm looking forward to working with you over the years ahead and want to point out that the this a lot of this success is a result of at the back of the room also we have our recruitment officer Maggie who's been focused on this as a key part of her Meg is a key part of this for the last year plus. So the next slide here shows Dan if we could advance the basic three-part strategy that we have been talking about for securing that trajectory that we just showed it involved retaining officers at a better rate than we have in the past through a new contract it involved recruiting new officers through both the contract and additional incentives that we are now offering and marketing and communicating the the what is unique about Burlington what the opportunities are here is something that we are now doing to a greater degree than we ever have in this past that we ever have in the past the as we do this work one of our goals in addition to getting back up to the the into the mid 80s for the number of officers is to rebuild a department that fully reflects the Burlington community with a focus on hiring women something that has been a goal and something that the BPD has successfully achieved better than much the industry at times in recent years it's a goal during this rebuilding period we're also looking to hire as many BIPOC officers as we can including specific efforts aimed at hiring from our Burlington immigrant communities the next slide I think this gets into some of the detail actually the chief is going to go through in a minute I just I wanted to finish with the just the resources that we're dedicating to this we have secured two big council working with the city council and I'm appreciative of the council's partnership in recent months we have really significant resources to pursue this new plan there is approximately 1.2 million dollars in our the rebuilding plan that was approved in the budget in June it's a three-year budget essentially to fund this effort includes $750,000 of funds from the last year's budget that we did not spend in part because of you know in large part because of the significant reduction number of officers these funds are now being redeployed into this rebuilding plan in addition we are there was $220,000 of unspent recruitment incentives from a prior recruitment and retention initiative last fall that money is being redeployed to this effort and we are expecting to work over three years with the city the Queen City Police Foundation to an unprecedented degree to bring in funds that will help offer specific incentives to two officers the and again I just I thank the city council for their partnership in supporting that budget also the other thing the council did is we have been talking in recent weeks is approve a new contract this new contract is a contract that will allow the the chief murad of the BPD to be very competitive as we attempt to retain officers and recruit new officers given the 12% increase in salary that is approved as part of that contract in the first year and and the the following years of additional increases with that I now I'm going to turn over the podium to chief murad who will walk us through the details of how these funds are going to be used and the details of how we're going to accomplish this plan thanks sir I'm sorry thanks and welcome I actually I have been told before that I need to be a little bit less grim when I stand at this podium but most of the time it's because we are at this podium for reasons that are not good ones we are here to brief about crime or about some incident and this is not that this is a great moment I'm really really happy to be at this podium to talk about where we are right now this contract that was gotten with the mayor that was approved by the city council the budget that the mayor worked so hard to get along with CAO Catherine Shad along with the approval of the city council great work with city council president Karen Paul to achieve a unanimous approval of that budget these are real turning points for us and they they represent a moment for us to be able to begin to rebuild and regrow and to to basically say all right the you saw that prognostication that that graphic that showed headcount today's headcount the headcount there is August 1st and yet we're already up we're up by three people and are moving in that direction I am hopeful that what we see in that graph represents a nadir a bottom for us it may not we may lose a couple more people over the rest of this calendar year I actually do believe that we will but I also believe that we can begin bringing people in and I am speaking directly to people in Chittenden County in the state of Vermont who want to be police officers if they want to be police officers here we want them to come we are looking for good men and women to join this most important of professions and so I think that what we have here is one of the most competitive packages in the state I think it's a very competitive package for the region I'm already hearing from people who aren't from Vermont interest in coming to this place the profession as a whole is in a tough spot the profession as a whole has lost people the profession as a whole has struggled with recruitment and retention and to a certain extent we are looking for people who are either leaving other places or could go to other places and what brings them here well this is a big part of it the other big part of it is the support that this demonstrates this demonstrates a new a new era for the working with the city council working with the administration working with the police commission working with the city that we serve in order to say we have recognized that where we are right now with regard to public safety isn't where we want to be but we do want to move forward into something better and I think this gives us those tools and I'm really eager for it I think that there are you know some specifics that we can talk about with regard to some of the ways that we do that and we've talked about this a bit at the board of finance and when getting the budget approved they include excuse me they include new positions to help us reach those people out there who want to be police officers both people who are already police officers and we hope to attract to this unique and terrific community and people who aren't police officers yet who have thought about it who bring with them skill sets that we've always needed in law enforcement and new skill sets that we recognize we want now and we're doing that in a lot of ways not just with police officers because when it comes down to it these it is not just about police officers we have community support liaisons that we are hiring we have three new positions to hire for there for that we have a total of six to seven community service officers one of our new recruits was a community service officer who's making that transition into the police world we're hopeful to see that happen more we're hopeful to bring excellent candidates in in those roles um we've had a lot of challenges over the past two years and in all of these challenges I believe I hope there has been a consistent theme our shared mission is keeping people safe but on a day-to-day basis it is police officers who do that work augmented now by CSOs and CSLs our job as a city is to support these men and women as they do that work and to set clear expectations on how and the two clearest examples of support that they need are this budget that the mayor has put together and the both the AFSCME contract and the BPOA contract that have been approved by our city council the expectations have to be clear too we have to treat everyone fairly we have to treat everyone compassionately and we have to do that competently um I often use the word neighbors rather than citizens or civilians because as Sir Robert Peel said the police are the public and the public are the police cops and the community have to be one in the same and I've spoken again and again internally with the officers about our living up to the words on paper that our country has established what America says on paper is that it's what the Declaration of Independence promised that all people are created equal and endowed with unalienable rights like life and liberty in the pursuit of happiness what America says on paper is that our constitution promises that we establish justice and that we ensure domestic tranquility and promote the general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty putting these words on paper is not the end it's just a beginning all of those things require public safety all of those things require a safe public in which all of us can share our public spaces together equally fairly and a big step to that is this and bringing people aboard so we do hope to hire a new public information officer and community engagement coordinator that's a single position with a very long title but it's a position that is going to help us tell our story about what we're doing to share that story sometimes with you the media with regard to specific events so that it's not just my phone that you're texting at you know four on a sunday afternoon but it is also a person who's engaged with the media in that way also a person who's engaged with the community that was a very important part of the description of that role someone who will be able to work with the community share the story hear their story a two-way conversation about what our community needs and wants and how the police are serving those needs we're hopeful to get a recruitment coordinator that recruitment coordinator is someone who will augment the work that is already being done by Megan O'Leary she is our current recruiting officer that's a police officer you need a police officer in a recruiting position and that is because people ask when people want to be cops they want to talk to a cop and ask questions of cops but we also need somebody who's going to understand better how the current market works what best practice tools are out there with regard to recruitment and how we tell that story in a way that not only communicates it as does the the public information officer community engagement coordinator but also tells the story in order to recruit and drive people to this agency and then uh sorry so i want to make a quick point on that just to make it's clear that those are two permanent positions that have been added to the structural budget of the bpd that is not that is separate from the 1.2 million three-year rebuilding plan but these are resources that should definitely help with that rebuilding yes sir and then thank you very much for that clarification um and then that that money is going to be used by those individuals in order to determine how we can market the burlington police department and this is frankly a first stage of that i i'm hopeful that this message that all of you are carrying will resonate uh through chitenden county and beyond and begin to let people know that we are open for business and we are looking to rebuild and we are looking to regrow and we're looking to do it in a way that meets what our community has said that it wants and re-establish the kinds of of safety that we expect here in burlington do you want to touch chief on any of the specific contract provisions you think are worth highlighting well i i think i think a lot of these are great i think we have a we have a really a good place to work this is a great place to work unlike a lot of places we do allow beards that was actually a decision of our police commission working together with the police commission they voted for that i wasn't in favor of it frankly but the police commission voted for that and added that to our directives we do allow beards we do allow tattoos these are things that are are part of our younger generations haven't always been a part of policing are not a part of many other agencies they won't allow those kinds of things a big one for us very important for us is that we will hire people who are not citizens of the united states so long as they are permanent residents green car holders uh that is a big difference between a lot of other agencies very big and it's very important for us and this unique community where we more than almost any other part of the state have a very large population of folks who fit that bill and we want those folks to become part of this agency whether it's police officers or whether entry level at uh as community service officers in order to build the skills necessary to become police officers being a cop is hard it's a very difficult job it is a job of shift work you are going to miss holidays you are going not always to be able to have the time off that you expected right now we're working too much overtime but that's always a function of the job it is a job that exposes you to terrible things sometimes but amazing things as well and you get amazing opportunities to contribute and the fact of the matter is not everybody makes it through and the reason that projection that was on the previous slide is so bumpy is that we lose people we lose people to plan attrition in other words there are people who are going to hit 20 years and be eligible for a pension and leave and we lose people for other reasons we lose people to injury we lose recruits from the academy because it doesn't turn out to be what they thought that it was and they will drop out the three recruits we have will all of them make it through i hope so we will do everything we can to support them here at this agency to make it so but the fact of the matter is this is a tough profession and we don't want it to be anything but because we want to have high standards in whom we attract and whom we keep and we want them to want this job that said we also want to ensure that we are opening this job to many different kinds of people perhaps that haven't been interested in it before that's an ongoing conversation that i'm part of at the state level as a member of a committee that works with the criminal justice council in order to assess entrance standards for the vermont police academy there are ongoing conversations about how the vermont police academy works as well i'm hopeful that we can tackle those in the coming years as well but in the meantime here at home in burlington we're going to use that money that we talked about for marketing we're going to use it for things that we have not done in the past with regard to effective storytelling and effective brand sharing to make certain that people understand what our brand is and our brand is its compassion it is a service of victims and it is public safety with and for our neighbors thank you chief i think at this point we'd be happy to answer any questions that your folks have yeah i i don't sure uh how does the uh how does burlington starting salary compare i think it blows everybody else out of the water right now in vermont and in chitin county uh and i think that it is a very fair uh a very strong starting salary and it's indicative of the value we place on the people who want to come and do this work for our community i think we could probably follow up Courtney and share the state police scale if if you could see for a comparison yeah okay dan can you work on the okay go ahead yeah we do okay the the question is um is part of this plan to in some way address the housing challenges that officers face uh when they're moving to the area and and specifically of trying to move to burlington this is um something that um you know we know very few of our current officers i don't know if you have an updated stat on that but currently live in burlington something we would like to address directly you want to speak to this effort yes sir uh so i don't have an exact stat on how many officers live in burlington it's not a huge number i do uh we have a number of officers who do but it's not as large as we'd like it to be more importantly we would love new officers to be able to live here i have been in discussions with uh people at the with the the chair of the queen city police foundation that's a 501c3 it's a difficult proposition to try to determine whether or not uh an entity like that is capable of of working on housing issues so we're still in the progress of discussing that but the trick would be to find uh people in burlington who are are willing to say particularly large you know people who have access to rental housing who will say we will incentivize burlington officers living here um and that's something that happens federally across the country there are a number of programs that have existed at various times uh to incentivize people to live usually in neighborhoods that are are a little bit challenged is often a way to bring a cop into a neighborhood that maybe is on the cusp of sort of a turnover um that's not necessarily something that we're looking for here we want them to live in burlington proper and anywhere we can find would be great and we want to work with uh people who can provide those incentives in ways that are lawful and fair but are also encouraging to officers to come because it is a challenge one of the officers who's recruit right now had to figure out where that he was going to stay during the pre-basic period that occurs here in burlington before going down to the police academy in pitsford um after the police academy he'll find a place but to have to get that you know uh several months early as it were was is a bit of a challenge it's not something we've supported in the past in a sense of us having a mechanism for supporting it that mechanism is something that we're going to build and use these funds to do that specifically the the hundred and fifty thousand that's shown as coming from the queen city foundation um now that this is improved in in motion we are going to nail down um housing incentives have been envisioned as being a significant part of that um I do think this is something we can raise uh raise funds for and and that there's community support for and that can be an additional incentive um beyond the beyond the contract terms for um for for recruits if i may be clear so it's not all from the queen city police foundation uh it would be obvious money that we hope to be able to achieve through uh fundraising or through grants some of it would be uh through the police the queen city police foundation not all of it some of it would be uh some of the things that we talked about during the budget presentation involved childcare incentives and those are things that other parts of the city are working on too the mayor's made it clear that he's very supportive of that working with uh members in the marketplace in order to try to create that for other city employees as well um many of these things hopefully will have that kind of extra benefit that these aren't just for police officers these are things that we can use to to increase our overall city employment and in general attract people to this community i have been working with other law enforcement agencies in the county to put together a a sense of of marketing that we all can share uh other police departments in the county through the the chamber of commerce and in order to say this is an attractive place to come and live because once we get them here in the county then we can we can scramble with south burlington pd over it and determine whether or not this salary is better or not um we can figure out all those other incentives but we want to get them here and and grow as a county as well not just as a city although i work for burlington and i live in burlington and i certainly prioritize burlington getting that experience and growth sure so we want we want okay uh so the question was about quotas around both race and gender and around diversity hiring uh beyond just uh traditional or excuse me in a sense of gender and non-binary employees um we have had non-binary employees before we've had transgender employees before not as police officer we've had we've certainly had a lot of different sexual orientations as police officers um those are we're looking for great candidates period we want people who who come to us with skill sets that allow them to be what we want we want uh we want people who can maintain order who can be de-escalatory who can connect with the community they serve who can do that compassionately and fairly and identity is a part of that and what you bring from your past to the job going forward is a part of that do we have quotas no quotas aren't lawful we do have goals we have goals we've joined a movement called 30 by 30 which is run uh out of new york and it is 30 female representation in the police profession by 2030 we joined that before i was allowed to hire again during the period of time where we were not allowed to hire police officers i joined that because i believe it to be important my wife and i named our daughter katie elizabeth after elizabeth katie stand because we i very much believe in uh in gender equality and making certain that we have uh fair representations on that in a profession that hasn't always been great at it um we are also of course looking to find people who are uh who bring with them advanced degrees or unique kinds of degrees not just criminal justice not just people with military backgrounds but all of those things are important to us too because all of these things can create a department that is able to represent a whole range of different service needs as it addresses the you know the requirements of a community like ours uh yes so i know in in seriousness and to repeat the question for you since you need that um do we expect there to be a certain amount of competition and do we expect there to be uh a sense of interest from other places yeah we have lost some officers to neighboring towns over the past two years i'm hopeful some of those may come back i'm hopeful that we may uh attract others to us and the incentivization the pay scale is a component of that the fifteen thousand dollar hiring bonus that was approved by the city council in autumn of last year is a component of that um we need that kind of support from our community both our elected representatives the community at large to make certain that people want to come work here because it's not merely about the money uh this is good money it's very good money for this profession but this is a hard profession and the fact of the matter is nobody does it only for the money and i don't know that i'd want people who did we want people who do this work because it's meaningful to them because they understand how meaningful it is to the community they serve and because it is a calling cops count and police matter and that means that cops on an individual basis they they count everything they do on a daily basis counts the police matter as an entity that is what that you know is a is a significant part of any community and i think that we are in a place right now in burlington uh that we recognize that and we're prepared to to bring people aboard with that understanding i don't know if you want to say something sir um i think we just i'm not sure we touched on it um there might have been a slide on it that i don't think we pause them but the this idea of of getting to this target over three years basically would involve doubling the amount of recruits of new recruits going through the academy over what we've had historically it would include essentially is it is it doubling or more with the laterals yes sir so thank you sir uh so it is a it's a 50 percent increase in the number of recruits that we hire in each class it is a 50 percent increase in the number of laterals that we bring aboard in each calendar year and it is 100 increase in the retention that is from a relatively low retention of i think 30 something percent to about 50 retention so that accounts for the fact that we don't keep everybody and retention is not just the groups that we bring in it's also the people who are already here we lose people again as i said before we lose people to retirement we lose people to resignation we lose people to realizing that this profession isn't for them occasionally we lose people to termination but we are not going to keep everybody we bring in that's not the nature of this profession or any profession for that matter we need to improve however how many we do keep if we can do that if we can double the at that improvement if we can bring in laterals at 50 percent higher numbers than we have in the past if we can bring in recruit classes you know we have three i need six i need six in the class in january and i need six in the class next august if we can do that then we keep to that schedule that is ambitious but achievable anything can derail that and if we end up with a class where there's four people instead of six people then that number changes a little bit if i end up with a spate of resignations or retirements that could change that a little bit but that prognostication there which is entirely a prognostication it is a hypothetical look at here's our patterns of retention and recruitment over the past here the goals that we're setting for ourselves here the knowns people who i know when certain people are going to hit their 20 and are likely to retire i don't know when other people are going to say this is enough for me or i've changed my feelings about this place or it's just time to hang it up or or something happened in my life and i can't be here anymore i don't know when recruits aren't going to make it through because they get injured or because they fail out because our standards are high and so are the vermont police academies or because they realize this just is not what i thought it was going to be i can't prognosticate for that on an individual basis but i can estimate when those things happen based on how often they've happened before and i can say i want to over achieve i want to achieve above that and that's what we see there is it something that we're absolutely going to do it is ambitious but achievable but there are a lot of things that can get in the way of making that happen and honestly the more all of us work together and pull together as a community to then the more likely it is that that will happen hey sanny go ahead good morning both of you my name is sanny bear and i'm an attorney and i'm an attorney who's particularly involved in incidents of domestic violence and i'm wondering if number one did domestic violence situations increase with the attrition of police officers and what if that's the case so you're going to include in your recruitment police officers and others who are experts at dealing with domestic violence situations yeah i just thank you great great question uh so right here domestic violence prevention is one of the specialized positions that we offer we offer specialty assignments like detectives narcotics canine officers domestic violence prevention we have an airport an international airport where we send officers that is a different thing than almost any other police department in the state um domestic violence is right up there because that is incredibly important to us your question around the numbers we did not see an increase in domestic violence assault misdemeanor or felony in fact those have gone down a little bit during the pandemic what we have seen a tremendous increase is domestic disturbance which is a precursor category and sometimes what we get to a situation we're not able to ascertain whether or not there was an assault whether it was a misdemeanor assault or a felony assault or an assault at all but we know that there was something that caused neighbors to call or others to call that caused us to take note of it and that rose drastically i'm hopeful that what that means actually is that we're intervening at earlier stages and that the decrease in assaults is a good thing because we're doing a little better at those interventions before domestic disturbance becomes a domestic assault i know that we are working hard i have kept our domestic violence prevention officer i've had to reassign a lot of specialty roles as we have gotten smaller we went from an an entity with with 90 you know normally around 96 we had 92 uh in june of 2020 we are down right now to 61 uh and fewer than that are available for for for actual deployments 54 and of those only 21 are actually on patrol who are dedicated as officers to patrol i have nevertheless despite we as we get smaller and smaller i have kept that domestic violence prevention officer assigned to her role because the role is so important and uh frankly she makes officers on the roads jobs easier because they can refer cases to her and she can take them over in a way that it ultimately makes it easier on the road even though they are missing a person that they could otherwise have as a coworker on patrol it is an incredibly important role is it one that we will continue to have as long as we can keep it i will keep that uh and right now as i said i'm hopeful that we are not going to get smaller uh but one can never say never uh particularly after where we've been over the past two years so i want to know that we but i this is a very important piece to me and it's a piece that i hope is indicative of of our agencies uh the vastness of of our opportunity in this agency which is only going to increase as we grow we used to have officers who did emergency response an emergency response officer we used to have a community affairs officer i see the need to embed an officer in what we call CAPE our crisis assessment intervention program which is where our csls reside which is where the domestic violence prevention officer resides where our victims advocate resides uh i see the office the need to have co-deployment of officers at some point it's not something we can do right now i want us to be able to engage with the community better both as a community affairs officer but other positions as well and right now we're being asked for that by members of for example our police commission other members of the public and yet when we have 21 people on any given shift we may only have two police officers patrolling the city to have them pull away and engage with the public at a barbeque or going to a school event is not feasible we need to grow back to be able to do those things that are so important to having strong relationships with the community likely be here like when will those folks likely be on the job and you post with the just making it a sense of timeline for those who need the csls and those who need the officer so when you when you say the civilian positions do you mean the the public information officer and the recruitment coordinator okay because because obviously we have the csls already we're we need to grow them um we have the csls already and we need to grow those we're doubling essentially each of those roles and that's going to be a priority for us uh the pio position is is nearly ready to post i think that it will be posted this week the recruitment coordinator will take a little bit longer and ultimately we'll have to go through a process uh at board of finance and other places in order to make certain that it's approved but i'm hopeful that we get both of those positions posted ASAP and then are able to start doing working with with human resources using our channels for advertising these kinds of position in order to to reach out to communities both law enforcement communities people who have experience as a as a law enforcement pio or that don't that are they're coming from a different kind of place and ultimately that hiring process will be what hr does with regard to the identification and then we will have to do background checks and vetting and there will have to be some kind of of interview process that will inevitably involve the mayor's office and others um and we'll figure out you know because this is going to be an important position it's going to work a lot with the mayor's office it's going to work a lot with you all um maybe i'll have one of you guys sit on the on the hiring panel i don't know but uh it's it's going to be a process that we that we follow um where i hope to be able to post that this week that i can't answer because usually about two months from the time something's posted two to three months from posting to to in general i mean maybe there's specific things here and i'm going to cut you off no sir but that's typically what we see the uh we want to be clear that our background check may be a little bit may take things a little longer than that but i'm i'm i'm good if he tells me three months we're going to try to make that happen in three months excellent the um and i want to be clear both the positions were in the budget as i said earlier they were funded and um the pio position is fully ready for posting the uh community the recruitment coordinator requires an additional step as that she referenced so that's a little bit behind that but that should be happening soon yes sir what's the benefit of having a civilian pio as opposed to a uniformed officer pio you know i'll just i'll let the chief answer intersect to the sorry the the the the question is why why have we created this civilian recruitment position um when this is something we've had um uh an officer doing the past um again Officer O'Neill here with us who's serving that role now um and we we will continue to have officers very involved in in this um however this is on the state police have recently created a position very similar position it's uh at a time when we have such limited sworn officer resources this um i think is really necessary two two things going on right now we have more limited sworn officer resources than we ever had and we have a greater need to recruit than we've ever had so putting additional resources in place to help succeed right now uh this is i think a logical way to do it again it's it's one of the other agencies we're seeing do and um i think especially in this period we'll allow uh hopefully we'll allow our officers or limited number of officers to be deployed um uh to to the public safety needs as much as possible as opposed to pulling them off for sort of essentially administrative uh or you know some will be strategic efforts but they're ones that you don't need a you know you don't need to have gone through the officer certification program to be able to do this work and and the same is true of the pio position as well uh so the reason you know a lot of agencies work with non-uniformed pios with non-swarm psos um pios excuse me uh is is this is the same thing um and a lot of places end up bringing you know former newspaper people in or former media people so if any of you guys are looking uh we'll be posting that soon and and we'd be happy to have your application in there was a 500 percent increase i guess in gunfire incident uh is there going to be any focus or targeting towards we're doing about you know the presence of guns around this experience too was in my neighborhood um last couple months so um is there any plan to address that so yes i think the last press conference we had was um following the recent um homicide and suicide uh several weeks ago um chief mirad i mentioned in my opening remarks we're extremely focused right now on uh the rise in in gunfire incidents it's extremely concerning to us um we have had two events here standing with the state's attorney making it clear that this um this type of activity which is unusual in burlington we haven't seen this kind of shootings at anywhere near these levels in in recent years that it's got to stop that it's unacceptable um and we are working very hard and have been working hard throughout this period to hold individuals accountable who are firing these guns and i think there has been 1918-19 arrests of these 40 different gunfire incidents going back to the beginning of 2020 um there are some significant cases that are still open that we're working very hard on currently i will say we are also in a way that um is unprecedented in the the 10 years that i've been in this role having conversations with other agencies seeking to bring additional law enforcement resources to bear whether that's in terms of investigatory resources uh sharing of information with other agencies prosecutorial resources there is a great deal of work going on right now to uh you know especially as we've been talking given the limited resources burlington the bpd has currently to bring other resources to bear here and um we will be talking more about that in the days and weeks to come um and that is very that is very much a part of the ongoing work whether it it and and i think that is there sort of the backdrop um of what we're talking about today that we to to have a fully uh resource detective bureau to be able to properly um do everything we can to disincentivize to make it less likely that these crimes take place in the first place we need a more robust police department and so a big part of the reason we are pushing so hard taking all these steps to rebuild the department is uh and what i want to be very clear we have reason i feel such urgency in um creating these plans and delivering on these plans is uh because of of that and some of the other concerning public safety trends we face um so i hope that answers your question i'm not sure if you were maybe you're asking something slightly different about whether did that address your question or you or is there something more specific you were looking for in that question i guess i was looking for like structurally like how you're probably going to plan but i understand that it's a very recent event so you're probably still in a process well i'll say that if if we were at 85 today i would probably have an officer devoted to uh a task force position about this i can't afford to do that right now our detectives we don't have enough of them so um instead we have officers devoted to the cases in front of them and those include as the mayor said a lot of cases that we are working on um you know we said it before at a previous press conference but when you have that increase in volume and and let's be clear that 500 percent is is a shocking number it's a small it's a that's a shocking percentage number it is a small absolute number right we are talking about a small absolute number and yet it's huge relative to previous years and officers detectives who have previously had one or two of these incidents a year uh to which they they investigate are now having one every other week and every single detective in that uh detective unit basically has a shooting assigned to him or her in order to look at them it is a it's a tremendous burden on them uh if i had more then i would be able to pull one out and say you are specialized and you are doing this this is your job to to tackle all this i i don't have those kinds of resources because they still have all those burglaries that are up many of those car thefts that are up end up having a certain amount of detective work applied to them um many other kinds you know certain felony assaults may have detective work applied to them and so uh they are they're they're pushing more than their normal load up the hill um but the more folks we get the bigger we grow uh the more able we are to actually sort of get to to some of that and and figure out new ways to tackle them um but as the mayor said we are doing that already particularly with regard to partners in the in the county and at the federal level and i actually you know we have had some movement on some of our shooting cases that i'm i'm hopeful that we will be able to talk about some of that movement soon but a component of of any kind of investigation is is also making certain that the people you're looking into uh don't have you know enough information for you to be able to look at them so that's a component of it too have there been any change on the motive that you've been able to find out or the victims condition uh no no there the the victim is is alive and then still at the hospital um the the picture of of motive hasn't changed much we uh obviously have the suspect um who took his own life uh and uh was was there knew both of those victims um and it does appear to have a component of there was a relationship a an amorous relationship um and so to that extent it has domestic violence components uh but um we are that that's a case that is still being worked on i don't believe we have yet been able to interview that victim i think that victim is uh is still uh you know it's a delicate situation it's somebody who has been through a lot and uh the ability to to to do the things we need to do to understand fully what occurred uh are uh we have to be cognizant of that we have to be compassionate and caring about that and those take a back seat to worrying about a timetable for us you want you can have the final question uh if you have one more from rockpoint this weekend um we're able to identify a victim for circumstances or bloody thing at that site you change uh so i can't speak to to the question about the site um what i can say is uh you know i hike in rockpoint uh pretty regularly take my my kids and the dog there um i think that it is a safe place that has a certain amount of uh you know you gotta be careful when you're there we believe currently that this was probably a suicide i'm not prepared yet to name the individual i'm confirming that we've made next of kin notifications first but based on the history the individual had uh this was a person that law enforcement had had 20 interactions excuse me 14 interactions with since june 1st and and that's a lot and many of them were driven by issues around mental health etc i'm pretty certain that this was a suicide we worked with the coast guard in order to gain access to uh the decedent there was no ground access our officer actually had to take off his gun belt and and vest and jump in the lake in his uniform in order to get to the shore um this was you know it's it's uh it's a very sad incident a very terrible incident but i don't believe that it has any implications for anything wider in the community okay thank you all thank you chief appreciate you all join us and talk more soon