Chittenden County State’s Attorney Sarah George lobbied Burlington Mayor Emma Mulvaney-Stanak to get control of the city's police chief in the days leading up to the mayor’s mandate that the department funnel all press releases through her office for approval, emails obtained in a records request show. George had been calling for stronger oversight of the Burlington Police Department’s public communications for some time and raised the issue again on December 30 in response to a press release about Michael Reynolds, a Burlington man who police say they have interacted with nearly 2,000 times over the years. The release featured a lengthy statement from Chief Jon Murad in which he called on George's office to consider prosecuting Reynolds under an enhanced penalty known as the habitual offender statute. Reynolds has previously been convicted three dozen times, including for six felonies, and faces well over a dozen new pending charges. Murad's statement was later picked up by WBUR Boston’s syndicated “On Point” radio program, which is carried by hundreds of radio stations nationally. “The obsession with Mr. Reynolds despite BPD’s own decisions to repeatedly cite him rather than lodge him is so disingenuous and misleading to the community,” George wrote on December 30 in an email to Mulvaney-Stanak's staff, just minutes after Murad’s statement was released. She called Murad’s missive not only “unnecessary and performative” but also legally inaccurate, and said pontificating about how someone should be charged is “not his role.” The chief "really needs to knock it off,” George wrote. George expanded on her criticism in a separate email to a WCAX-TV reporter seeking her thoughts on Murad’s statement. The habitual offender enhancement is intended to address people who should be “incarcerated long term for extreme violence” but for whom prosecutors don’t have serious enough pending charges to pursue such a sentence, George wrote. The sheer number of pending cases against Reynolds already grants prosecutors the ability to levy a hefty punishment against him — “IF we decided that [he] should be in jail for years,” she wrote. Meanwhile, rather than send Reynolds to jail, BPD officers often issue citations that allow him to leave crime scenes. Judges can’t impose bail when someone shows up for those dates, George wrote, which Reynolds “almost ALWAYS” does. “I understand WCAX wanting to give time to things that BPD puts long press releases out about — Michael Reynolds and Patrick Ibbotson are good examples,” she…