Burlington, Vermont’s mayor held her first press conference with the city’s new interim Police Chief today.
Mayor Emma Mulvaney-Stanak, a Progressive, reported that since Interim Police Chief Shawn Burke began working on March 24th, he has been focusing on the people in the department and the community.
“We have met and will continue to meet frequently over the next few months to advance his first priorities here as chief," the Mayor noted. "The first piece is to do an honest assessment of our recruitment and retention strategies. A second priority will be assessing and making recommendations related to our priority response plan. That is the plan which we use for triaging our calls from the public and how we also utilize our full rank and file. That’s not just the police officers but it’s our Community Safety officers. It’s our Community Support Liaisons as well. Rebuilding relationships both internally and externally will be another priority for the chief.”
Burke acknowledged that building internal relationships will be a critical part of the work as the department is rebuilt.
“In the last 7 days the BPD has attended to 575 incidents, 30 percent of those have been handled by someone other than a sworn police officer. So we know in our work that we don’t have the sworn police officers that we need to do this work," Burke said. "But we do have a strong rank and file of professionals that are here to assist and how can we better leverage those resources and that will be an area of focus.”
The downtown area has been a focus of city safety concerns. Crime increased after the City Council reduced and capped the number of sworn officers in 2020. That move was reversed and the Police Department has been working to rebuild staff. Burke said he went out to the Church Street area to get a sense of what is happening in the downtown’s retail center.
“And frankly I was shocked at some of the public intoxication and drug use issues that I saw. And I think some of the people that I encountered were a little shocked when I told them you simply can’t do that. I realize that we are faced with being home to all the social services essentially in Chittenden County. So whereby we have a lot of people with unmet social service needs here living unhoused. But we have to figure out a way to better broker that," Burke said. "And then I guess I’ll just say there’s a lot more assessment that needs to go on within the organization and then by improving our systems, better supporting our employees, this is a customer service business, that experience just simply improves. And that’s a major focus of my moving forward.”
Interim Chief Burke has been appointed for two years. The city has contracted with a hiring firm and Mayor Mulvaney-Stanak hopes a permanent chief can be hired by the end of 2025.
