Burlington Police Department cruisers parked outside the department in Burlington on Monday, August 26. Photo by Glenn Russell/VTDiggerThe Burlington Police Department has no clear mission. It is severely understaffed, and its officers are routinely burnt out and utterly overwhelmed by a growing number of high-priority incidents.That’s according to an internal survey of Burlington police officers, conducted anonymously by the Burlington Police Officers’ Association in July and August.The survey paints a bleak picture of a department at a pivotal moment — its chief of four years, Jon Murad, announced this week that he will not seek reappointment next year. His replacement will have to contend with a beleaguered staff struggling to keep up with a growing number of incidents.Yet, while the department focuses its efforts on recruitment, some of its staff say not enough attention has been taken to retain officers, according to the survey responses. Some have taken issue with department leadership, while others have pointed fingers at the mayor’s administration and the City Council.Seventy-five percent of the officers asked about morale in the survey said it was poor or terrible, while more than half of the respondents said they have searched for a new job in the past six months, according to a summary of the results. “We continue to lose experienced officers to retirements or just to civilian life, as the untenable push forward towards a better future for policing in Burlington stretches without end into an uncertain future while straining mental states, personal lives and families,” one survey respondent wrote.The survey was obtained by VTDigger through a public records request. The police department denied VTDigger’s public records request for the survey, but upon appeal, Mayor Emma Mulvaney-Stanak’s office released it. Murad, in an interview earlier this month, attributed much of the despondency in the survey to exhaustion.“They’ve been running this way for two, three years, and in 2024, the running didn’t end,” he said. “The head count didn’t change much, and people were really, really tired.”“There are real concerns, and they’re concerns that we have to listen to and we have to be able to address,” Murad added. “But they are being exacerbated by the fact that we don’t have enough people to do the job that we’re asked to do.”‘Fighting a forest fire with a flamethrower’Murad took the reins of the department just as its staffing woes began.Named acting chief in June 2020, his appointment coincided with the Burlington City Council’s vote that same month to authorize a 30% reduction of the police force — from 105 to 74 — through attrition.Acting Burlington Police Chief Jon Murad speaks at a press conference in Burlington on December 9, 2022. File photo by Glenn Russell/VTDiggerIt came after the killing of George Floyd in Minnesota prompted nationwide protests against racial injustice. The vote responded to calls from residents, community members and activist groups to redirect city funding away from the police department to social services.That decision, survey respondents said, marked the beginning of a slide into the position the department is in now. At the department’s lowest point, in 2022, only 21 officers were patrolling the city of roughly 45,000 on an average day, Murad said. Prior to 2020, the department had as many as 52 officers on patrol in a day.While departments across the state and country face challenges recruiting new police, Joe Corrow, the head of the Burlington Police Officers’ Association, said in an interview that the Queen City is in a unique position.“This is a national issue. Nobody’s arguing that,” Corrow said. But, he claimed, “The difference is only a few police departments in the entire country went through what we went through, and lost as many officers as we did.”Efforts have since been made to bring Burlington police numbers back up. The cap on officers was raised to 87 in 2021, and in September the council voted to again revisit that number, asking department officials for a recommendation on staffing levels by the end of the year.But efforts to recruit more officers have proven difficult. The department began this year with 69 but is currently down to 65 — below the projected number that Murad hoped to have by this date when he presented a plan to rebuild the department in 2022.According to survey respondents, the exodus of police officers “has slowed but has not stopped.”“As much as some people want to believe we can rebuild within four years, it’s never going to happen,” a respondent wrote.The staffing woes coincided with a major uptick in calls to the police.  Since 2020, the number of incidents per month that police are called to respond to has doubled, according to police data.Incidents of assault, burglary, larceny, stolen vehicles and mental health issues reached five-year highs in 2022 and 2023, according to police data. Total incidents in 2024 have begun to drop slightly over last year, but the department is still addressing more incidents than in 2019 with 50% fewer nonsupervisory patrol officers.In 2021, Murad instituted a “priority response plan,” meant to direct the low numbers of staff to only the more serious incidents, such as robbery and assault. That system has diminished call volume for patrol officers — though it’s also caused frustration among some residents upset by the lack of response to lower-priority crimes.But patrol officers and senior personnel are still forced to manage the significant increase in calls for services with fewer resources. Officers are overworked and tired, and as more experienced officers have either retired or left, the department is left with “a very young department who are less able to effectively train new officers,” one respondent said.“When officers are tired, mistakes happen,” another respondent said.These working conditions have contributed to a plummeting morale, survey respondents said. “I view it as fighting a forest fire with a flamethrower,” one respondent wrote. “The cops on the road are really suffering in a very tangible way,” another wrote.One respondent opined that the department “has no mission.”“It has no clear path forward and every officer feels it,” they said. “It is clear that no one knows what we are really trying to accomplish. The lack of mission has left the agency spinning, wandering aimlessly.”READ MORE Burlington police union will take police oversight fight to the Statehouse by Corey McDonald November 15, 2024, 4:52 pmNovember 18, 2024, 2:31 pm ‘A dam break’Murad addressed the survey responses during an all-team meeting this fall — an opportunity, he said during an interview, to speak directly to the staff and find ways to “correct course.”“It’s not always comfortable to hear those kinds of concerns, but it’s absolutely necessary to hear those kinds of concerns so that you can address them,” he said.Corrow, who proposed the survey, said the goal was to “get an idea of what people thought were current issues inside the department” as well as issues with the city and “what they thought their ideas would be to fix those issues.”Despite the staffing issues, many respondents said they have stayed onboard because of a manageable schedule. Officers also cited their pay and their coworkers as reasons to stick around.“Schedule and pay are something good,” another said. “That’s it. We do have a good core group of officers and supervisors are top notch in my opinion.”Murad said he has tried to reinforce that by avoiding entering into emergency staffing. If the department falls below a certain number of staff, the department, at the discretion of the chief, can force staff to enter into an emergency 12-hour schedule. He said he’s also tried to minimize forced overtime.But Murad has said the department is already well below that threshold. He’s resisted, he said, because he feels it would represent “a dam break” for morale in the building.“It would be a tipping point, and that is why I have resisted doing them for four years,” he said.Still, respondents in the survey said they feel emergency staffing feels inevitable.“We are in a crisis. We are steadily marching towards emergency staffing and nothing is happening to change that,” a survey respondent wrote. “Emergency staffing is a less attractive schedule because it does not take people’s family lives into account, and it will lead to more departures and what will happen then? We absolutely need to completely change how we attract, recruit, hire, and train new officers.”Burlington police officers listen as Jon Murad was named as the city’s new police chief by Mayor Miro Weinberger on Jan. 27, 2022. File photo by Glenn Russell/VTDiggerInternal dissentWhile staffing issues have been well-documented in the survey and elsewhere, respondents also expressed concerns over the police department’s leadership.Several noted a disconnect between leadership and rank-and-file members, with some alleging favoritism for certain officers.“Certain supervisors do as they please, rules and directives be damned, while simultaneously targeting officers that they don’t personally like,” one respondent said.Another said there are “some supervisors who are allowed to do whatever they want with no consequence.”Survey respondents also complained of a lack of training and advancement opportunities.Meanwhile, the increase in community service officers and liaisons since 2020 has created tension internally. Community service liaisons operate as social workers within the department, and are often visiting encampments and helping direct unhoused people to services. Community service officers, meanwhile, are uniformed but unarmed personnel who respond to complaints primarily around property damage and other quality-of-life concerns in the community.Some feel the turn toward these officers “has only made officers confused as to what they actually do, and see no change in work for the average patrol officer,” one survey respondent wrote.With more low-level calls being assigned to these community service officers and liaisons, patrol officers are “forced to go from high-level to high-level calls without the downtime and more casual encounters with the public that those lower-level calls afforded,” a respondent said. “This is leading to more stress, burnout, and less joy in community interactions.”READ MORE Burlington pays out $215K to settle 2019 excessive force lawsuit by Corey McDonald September 17, 2024, 4:05 pmSeptember 17, 2024, 4:05 pm Oftentimes, civilian officers responding to disturbances are forced to call patrol officers to make an arrest or issue a ticket, adding to their already heavy workload.Other respondents suggested that the police leadership and supervisors treat some civilian staff “like they are less than human and favor certain officers,” one respondent said. “Back door deals like scheduling have happened.”Murad said he has taken steps since August to try to change how supervisors regulate overtime and allocate requests for time off.“There were people who were frustrated by what they saw as lack of consistency or unfairness,” he said. “If you don’t know about it, you can’t address it, and I absolutely was happy to know about it and be able to talk about it.”He said the department is also taking steps to improve morale by offering more training opportunities, and by providing more wellness programs for employees in the department. The department has expanded its definition of fit force — a program the department offers that allows officers to take one hour during their shift to go to the gym, or do yoga, for example, as a way to decompress.“But ultimately, how are we going to get the morale in this place up? By having more people so these officers don’t have to answer as many calls for service per person,” he said. “That is the path.”In an interview, Mulvaney-Stanak said that “issues of being deeply overworked were clear” in the survey but said there are often “bigger, more pressing issues that cause folks to not want to apply somewhere to work or cause people to want to leave a place of employment.”“Those driving issues around morale are when employees are overworked, when there’s not an opportunity to do career advancement in a meaningful way, sometimes when there’s issues of leadership in a workplace, and then sometimes other issues around values, alignments,” she said. She added, “I see some really strong themes that, to me, are more compelling things for us to be focused on… to really make sure we’re getting more to the core of the reason around why people are dissatisfied working at the Burlington Police Department or don’t want to come to work her.”Lost momentum Murad was officially named the department’s chief in June 2023 just as department officials felt they were rounding a corner. Following a brutal year in 2022 that saw historic levels of violence in the city, including five homicides, the department had one of its best hiring years on record in 2023, starting the year with 61 officers and ending it with 69, after a new police contract was finalized the year prior.Meanwhile, a ballot item that would have added additional disciplinary oversight to the police commission was roundly defeated in March of that year — an outcome praised by the officers in the survey.That momentum “has been lost in 2024,” Murad said. Hiring has slowed, and the department is losing more officers than it can hire.While the department has done well in hiring community service officers and liaisons, Murad said those positions cannot replace the duties of police officers.“They’re really important. I love that they work so well and that the police work well with them,” he said. “But if we don’t have cops, we don’t have a public safety system for the Burlington Police Department and the city of Burlington.”Many survey respondents pointed fingers at the city’s elected leadership in fostering a lack of enthusiasm among recruits to apply to the Burlington department. The recent ballot item, passed on Nov. 5 that grants the city’s police commission more oversight powers, is only reinforcing this perception, respondents said.When asked about this sentiment, Mulvaney-Stanak said the new oversight powers “will not be a regularly invoked element of the process, and hopefully we also, of course, are training and supporting our officers around understanding our policies, our procedures, so that there are fewer issues of discipline.”“People do not want to come work in Burlington BECAUSE of Burlington; not because of the agency,” a respondent wrote. “The city leadership has shown themselves to be outright hostile toward law enforcement-until that changes (and very publicly) the staffing issue cannot be fixed.Another respondent said that many officers “are struggling with depression and anxiety as they suffer the vilification of us by the city.”After Tuesday’s announcement that Murad would not be seeking reappointment, Mulvaney-Stanak said in a press release that a national search will be conducted to find the city’s next police chief.Murad plans to continue to lead the department into April. In December, he’ll appear before the City Council to address tools the department can use to bolster its recruitment efforts. These include lateral officer relocation assistance plan, which could offer money to officers to help them move, and a new employee referral program, where any employee who successfully refers a new employee will be eligible for a bonus, Murad said.“I have tried very, very hard to stand up for and advocate for men and women inside this agency,” Murad said, “and I’ve tried my best to do that for for four years now, and to the extent that I have held on, it’s because I believe I’ve been doing that for their benefit, and ultimately, for the city’s benefit.”Read the story on VTDigger here: ‘We are in a crisis’: Internal survey shows deep discontent among Burlington police.