Brattleboro wants to increase police presence to combat rising crime

BRATTLEBORO – With complaints of drug trafficking and related illegal activities on the rise, local leaders want to add more police personnel and space to combat the rise in crime throughout the community.

The Brattleboro City Council, facing a packed meeting, voted unanimously Tuesday to review cost estimates for increasing the budgeted number of police officers from 27 to 30 and opening a satellite station in the troubled downtown Transportation Center parking garage.

“We want to show compassion,” Police Chief Norma Hardy said of the people seen overdosing on park benches or bathing and urinating in public fountains, “but you also have to be realistic and at some point start thinking about everyone else who lives here.”

This hub in southeastern Vermont is seeing a 16% increase in police calls, from 5,049 in the first six months of last year to 5,879 in the same period this year, city records show. Reports of the most serious crimes, such as assault and burglary, have increased by the same percentage, from a weekly average of 8.6 calls in 2023 to 10.1 calls currently.

According to statistics, one in three of these crimes is linked to drugs or alcohol.

“Compared to communities your size, you are consistently higher,” Jim Baker, former commander of the Vermont State Police and former police chief of Rutland City, recently told local officials about the deployment numbers.

Baker, who works as a consultant for a state initiative to improve public safety, noted that Brattleboro is just one of many communities in the state and across the country facing such problems. But the average number of major crime calls of 10.1 per week exceeds those of similarly populated places like Barre (6.7) and Bennington (8.0), he said.

(Burlington, the state's largest city and four times the size of Brattleboro, has a weekly average of 35.7, which Baker calls an “outlier.”)

Brattleboro, the Vermont community closest to the New England drug routes around Holyoke, Massachusetts, and Hartford, Connecticut, has begun issuing 30-day bans on people found using illegal substances in city parks and parking lots.

“The city says, 'Enough is enough,'” Hardy told the city council on Tuesday.

At the request of the Chief of Police, the Board approved the installation of three surveillance cameras downtown and the replacement of two contracted private security guards with two uniformed, unarmed municipal patrol officers who will be part of a new Brattleboro Resource Assistance Team (BRAT).

In addition, local officials will seek cost estimates not only for more police officers and a downtown field office, but also for two additional BRAT staff (one as a peer support specialist) and an emergency services data analyst.

“For at least 30 years, staffing levels have not been sufficient to maintain a consistent, consistent presence in our downtown area,” Hardy wrote in a supplementary memorandum. “That clearly needs to change.”

The board could receive cost estimates as early as next month, at which point the public can voice its opinion and officials will decide if and when to proceed with the project.

This seemingly swift response came five years after local officials first received a flood of public complaints about the problems. In 2019, employees of about 20 downtown businesses wrote a letter to the editor about the then-burgeoning problem, sparking a debate between residents calling for tougher action and others calling for compassion.

Dick DeGray, a former Selectboard member and longtime green-thumbed volunteer, and Boys & Girls Club staff pushed for more security measures at a dozen meetings between May 2022 and June 2023, when local politicians voted to hire private security guards on a trial basis to assist police.

But the complaints only increased: police and public servants confiscated needles, syringes and other drug paraphernalia from municipal buildings every day.

Businesses that have survived the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic have expressed frustration that the situation is scaring away shoppers just as signs of new commercial and cultural life are emerging.

“The feeling of safety – or lack of it – is at an all-time high,” said Kate Trzaskos, executive director of the Downtown Brattleboro Alliance, at a recent board meeting. “We struggle with that every day.”

Baker pointed to a series of local headlines stemming from the murder of a Brattleboro animal shelter coordinator last year.

“I have never worked in a community where I feel the depth of trauma that I feel in Brattleboro,” said the former chief turned consultant.

Nevertheless, Baker was able to see something positive in the increase in police operations.

“This means that people call the police because they trust the police,” he said.

Residents who crowded into recent selection committee meetings see things differently.

“I think it shows,” DeGray said, “that there's a lot going on in our city that people are just fed up with.”