More Cops Won’t Keep Us Safe

On Monday, June 24th, the Burlington City Council unanimously voted to increase the Burlington Police Department’s budget by $2.47 million. They funded 10 additional armed cops, 5 lesser-armed cops (Community Service Officers), and allocated $100,000 toward recruiting efforts that have been a complete failure to date. In the unlikely event that more applicants are available to hire, the Progressive Mayor of Burlington pledged to find funding to hire them, too.

This budget represents Mayor Emma Mulvaney-Stanak’s efforts to make good on a campaign promise to direct more resources toward a police department with a history of violence, abuse, intimidation, and mismanagement beginning long before BTV CopWatch started filming police in the streets of Burlington. This clown show with guns has been well documented. The incidents keep piling up, increasing BPD’s notoriety on a national level. The fact that no one in city government dissented in this vote less than 20 days after BPD traumatized a group of Burlington High School students is negligent. This not only displays a disregard for the health and safety of community members harmed by cops, but it also demonstrates a lack of imagination, courage, and, most importantly, respect for the rich history of Black-led organizing and activism for police reform and abolition in this town.

Anyone who lived here in 2020 remembers when the murders of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and countless other Black people pushed so many of us beyond the breaking point and into action. Groups like Battery Park Movement, The Black Perspective, Black Lives Matter of Greater Burlington, and Vermont Racial Justice Alliance, and many prominent Black community leaders all demanded in unison directing municipal funds away from policing and into creating new structures of community care and support. These demands were very clear, carefully articulated, and frequent. They were unmistakable.

The city responded in June 2020 by adopting a policy that would cap BPD’s sworn officer headcount at 74, reducing the size of the force through attrition. It managed to pass a fiscal year budget in 2021 that cut police spending by $1.6 million. This accomplishment remains historic. The headcount began to fall immediately in the face of constant protest, turmoil at the police commission, rowdy city council meetings, bad press involving Brandon Del Pozo’s trolling scandal, and, most importantly, a relentless month-long occupation of Battery Park demanding the firing of Joseph Corrow, Cory Campbell, and Jason Bellavance for their violent, unprovoked attacks on Black men in 2018. We would like to think that dozens of people constantly filming every cop in sight had something to do with this decline, too.

By July 2021, BPD’s sworn officer headcount had fallen to 75 from 90 a year prior. This prompted the city to abandon the attrition policy and raise the officer cap to 87 in October 2021, but by December of that same year, the headcount fell further to 64. The headcount dropped to 63 in early 2023 before rebounding very slightly to the current count of 67, according to the June 24 resolution. Police Chief Murad cited “lack of political support” as the most common reason stated in exit interviews. Despite cutting around 30% of BPD’s officers, its budget rebounded in 2022 and has increased steadily since. The “defund” approach laid out by the local Black Lives Matter movement was never attempted.

So now it is 2024, COVID-era emergency food and shelter programs have ended, more and more people are forced to live on the streets, our community struggles with addiction to increasingly fatal drugs, poverty remains criminalized, and we continue to lose neighbors. We don’t emphasize this enough, but people are dying out there, and the only thing the city seems to be able to offer is more cops. BPD is a well-funded institution with a lot of personnel. They’ve been out there, and they haven’t been helping. Despite taking a third of our municipal dollars every year, they have not increased safety. We can understand when some people feel scared to be in public places in Burlington. It can be uncomfortable being proximate to poor people being loud or having a hard time. But what exactly do you expect cops to do? Move them elsewhere so they suffer out of your sight? Throw everyone in jail? More importantly, what are cops currently doing? If 67 cops can’t move us forward, what difference will another 10 make? Increasing BPD’s headcount is not a serious plan in the short, medium, or long term because the decline in police presence has nothing to do with the rise in poverty that makes people feel unsafe.

How many among us have a story where we were in danger and a cop swooped in to save us from harm? Cop watchers can tell plenty of stories of cops seeing dangerous situations and doing nothing. How many of us have a story where we are in danger and a friend, neighbor, or random person showed up to prevent, mitigate, or repair harm? This is much more common.

We can see the promise of addressing community safety with care-based approaches in our local mutual aid projects. Over the years, groups like the People’s Kitchen, Winooski Mutual Aid, ONE Mutual Aid, Food Not Cops, and countless organic constellations of neighbors have labored to share food, supplies, medicine, transportation, advocacy, emergency shelter, and companionship through an era of intense social isolation. Ordinary people have modeled the way forward, but political leadership lags behind. The fact is, we have elected some brave and kind people, yet as a group, they can’t seem to follow our lead. You have to start to wonder where the political power really lies in Burlington. Is it with elected officials? Is it with real estate, the business community, and the police union? It needs to be with us.

One thing we’ve learned from the past four years is that ordinary people have a lot of influence over police staffing levels. We don’t need votes or permission to exercise this power. Since 2021, the city has spent millions trying to expand BPD. They’ve hired expensive consultants to guide them. They’ve offered financial incentives to prospective cops. They’ve more than restored the budget. It has yet to work. Although it may not feel like abolitionists have as much momentum as we once had, and the will of political leadership isn’t what it was four years ago, we’re still out here. A lot of the cops we started out filming aren’t. No matter what happens in City Hall, we’re still out there. We have each other, we have cell phones, we have the time, and we still believe in a community without cops. We keep us safe. No new cops in BTV.