Brattleboro Police Department cruisers at Black Mountain Road headquarters. Photo by Kevin O’Connor/VTDiggerBRATTLEBORO — Facing residents’ competing requests for accountability, compassion and affordability, this town’s selectboard voted 3-2 on Tuesday to hire more police to address a community-wide rise in crime.“We need to recognize that what we have is an emergency,” board member Elizabeth McLoughlin said at a standing-room-only meeting that featured more than three hours of divided debate about public safety.As a result, the town will aim to address a 16% increase in both dispatch calls and serious offenses by boosting its budgeted count of officers from 27 to 30 and seeking up to six support staff for a new Brattleboro Response Assistance Team, or BRAT.The hires are part of an evolving “downtown safety action plan” that, with equipment and other expenses, will raise the municipality’s current fiscal year budget of $22.9 million by an estimated $675,000 and could increase the coming budget by an estimated $803,000, according to a selectboard memorandum.“The immediate question is where can we find the funds for these emergent public safety needs,” local leaders wrote in the memo. “For many years, the town has set aside fund balance in case of an emergency as a ‘rainy day’ fund. Staff are proposing the selectboard could find the present circumstances to be such an emergency.”That money — as well as some $325,000 in expected federal reimbursement for an unrelated capital project — could cover the costs for the current fiscal year, leaders said. They expect to calculate the exact numbers for Town Meeting consideration at a later date, but have yet to determine how to pay for the additional staff in subsequent budgets.Dozens of residents who squeezed into Tuesday’s meeting were split about whether to spend money on police or social workers, as well as if any potential solution warranted significantly higher taxes. While all agreed something needed to be done, a slim majority spoke in favor of boosting law enforcement.“I, like others, am not in favor of more taxes, but I think this is something that we have to support,” resident John Kennedy said. “I look at that as an investment in this town, an investment in my property values, so that we maintain the kind of community that is attractive to people.”The 3-2 decision — selectboard members McLoughlin, Peter Case and Daniel Quipp voted yes, while Richard Davis and Franz Reichsman voted no — came after a summer of reports about a 16% increase in crimes such as assault and burglary. Of those offenses, one in three involve drugs or alcohol, municipal records show.Although Brattleboro is just one of many communities facing such problems, its 10.1 weekly average number of calls about serious incidents exceeds those in such similarly populated places as Barre, at 6.7, and Bennington, at 8.0, researchers for a state public safety enhancement initiative have found.“What you’ve been doing in Brattleboro has not been working,” Police Chief Norma Hardy told the selectboard at an earlier meeting, “so we’re trying to come up with another way.”The additional positions come four years after local racial justice activists called for defunding law enforcement after the 2020 killing of Black Minnesotan George Floyd by Minneapolis police. Brattleboro police went on in 2021 to reduce their presence from three shifts to two, but for a different reason: not enough staff. The department, budgeted for 27 positions, then had only 12 people specifically assigned to patrols because of a lack of qualified applicants.Since Brattleboro hired Hardy as Vermont’s first Black female chief later that year, it has increased the number of officers to a current 20, according to the department’s website, although openings remain because of continuing nationwide recruitment challenges.Read the story on VTDigger here: Brattleboro to hire more police in hopes of curbing rising crime.