Brattleboro pressed to act on public safety

BRATTLEBORO-The topic of public safety dominated two recent Selectboard meetings, as business owners, nonprofit leaders, and townspeople expressed fear, frustration, hopelessness, and "compassion fatigue" about life downtown.

During its July 23 and Aug. 6 meetings, the board heard stories of public drug use, business break-ins, and harassment.

For those coming before the board, the message was clear: The community does not feel safe.

Several nonprofit organizations near the transportation center on Flat Street - where town police regularly respond to incident calls - shared their stories.

"I've been working downtown for many years and have never been afraid, and I have been afraid recently," said Gemma Champoli, manager and special projects director of Experienced Goods at 80 Flat St.

"We need help to go to work every day," she said. "We now drive around to make sure we can get out of our car safely."

Champoli said she starts each day with her partner cleaning up needles in front of the thrift shop, which is operated by Brattleboro Area Hospice.

"I saw someone shooting up behind our store," she continued. "And I stood there at the end of the day to see if she was going to fall into the river and drown. I mean, those are not normal work situations."

"Our campus isn't safe anymore," said Bethany Rehnquist, a member of the board of the New England Youth Theatre at the corner of Flat and Elm streets.

"This is the first summer that we haven't been able to run outdoor programming because every morning our staff has to come in and clear people who are sleeping on our property away," Rehnquist said. "They're coming in early just so that they can clear camping away and pick up needles and trash and other items."

Mary Freihofner, who owns Advanced Skin Care Solutions at 17 Elliot St., told of three "unsafe" incidents in her salon during the past five years, including one that left the business's door broken.

"It feels like a culture of socially disruptive behavior and that it's somehow OK that somebody can come into my salon and say inappropriate, scary things and smash in my window," she told the Selectboard.

"I've seen somebody smoking crack in the Transportation Center," she added.

Expressing the frustration felt by other business owners and managers in Brattleboro, Champoli asked, "How are we getting the assistance that we need to deal with these issues? We're not social workers."

The data tell a story

Assistant Police Chief Jeremy Evans of the Brattleboro Police Department (BPD) told Selectboard members that the BPD has been working to improve its data collection and analysis to target resources effectively.

"We're using data to make decisions on a daily basis," Evans said. "We're working hard to make it effective."

Jim Baker, a consultant with Gov. Phil Scott's Public Safety Enhancement Team (PSET), is providing technical assistance to the town police. According to Baker, the PSET data from 2022–2023, which are compiled from police records across the state, consistently ranked Brattleboro in the top eight communities with police calls for services that fit into categories indicative of underlying drugs, violence, and disorder.

Baker clarified in a conversation with The Commons that calls for service are investigated and then further categorized. Not every call for service results in the activity being categorized as criminal activity. He explained that there is a difference in how the police respond to "someone sticking a gun in someone's face and asking for money" and "property being stolen from a car."

Both activities, however, result in the public feeling unsafe.

"The data are telling a story," Baker said. "They tell us what the underlying issues are in Brattleboro."

Between January and June of this year, the BPD received 5,879 calls for service - 800 more than in the first half of 2023, an increase of more than 15%.

Some of this increase was due to the public's increasing trust in the department, Evans said.

The top locations for police calls during the first six months of 2024 were the Quality Inn in North Brattleboro, the North End Plaza (where Hannaford is located), the Brattleboro Food Co-op, Groundworks Collaborative on South Main Street, the Great River Terrace apartment complex on Putney Road, Brattleboro Memorial Hospital, the South End Plaza (where Market 32 is located), the Travelodge motel on Putney Road, the Brattleboro Transportation Center, and The Chalet in West Brattleboro.

According to Baker, 20 people have accounted for 5% of all police activity in the past three years.

"A small number of people are causing the chaos in the community," Baker said.

Evans said that the BPD has eight staff vacancies, but five recruits are in the final weeks of field training and will be patrolling on their own by the end of the summer.

Police work is social service work

The work of the BPD is supplemented by two police liaisons - one full-time and one part-time - staffed by Health Care and Rehabilitation Services (HCRS), and the department is in the process of hiring a third person for the program.

Recognizing that many people who come in contact with law enforcement aren't criminals but need social services to address issues like addiction, mental health, and domestic violence, HCRS started the program in Bellows Falls in 2002. Police liaisons provide community supports, case management, and coordination of services.

Knowles Wentworth has been a BPD police liaison since March 2023. In a recent interview with The Commons, he explained that people on the margins of society, some of whom are unhoused, may have profound feelings of trauma and shame that make it difficult to engage with others and with social services.

"These high utilizers [of police services] oftentimes aren't engaged with services," Wentworth said.

The goal, he said, is to "get folks from being so on the periphery to the engagement phase."

That's where they "actually start to meet with a case manager, meet with a housing case manager, engage in substance-use treatment or counseling," Wentworth said.

People living on the margins are experiencing anxiety that is "much more profound than it was even five years ago," Wentworth said.

"You only have to walk down Flat Street to walk past some of the people who have large open sores on their body from their use of fentanyl and xylazine or crack," he said.

"You have people who are really, really hurting and feeling awful about themselves and their prospects. Feeling very hopeless. It's pretty dire out there. It really is," Wentworth continued. "It's not unique to Brattleboro."

Libby Bennett is executive director of Groundworks Collaborative, which runs a 34-bed overnight shelter and food pantry and provides health and case management services to people experiencing homelessness.

The nonprofit's outreach team, which seeks to connect unhoused, unsheltered people in the area with services, has made contact with 145 people since the program started in February.

Bennett is concerned about "othering" people who live in our community.

"We have this way of saying 'the people who are downtown' as if they're not individuals," she said.

"This is not a story about Brattleboro, this is a story about every town in America," Bennett told The Commons.

"There's a set of policy choices and systems failures that brought us to this place where poverty is incredibly visible in ways that it wasn't before," she said. "And visible poverty makes us feel uncomfortable."

Bennett added that this poverty is "hard to see, but it's the society that we've built over time."

"To have all these systems fail people over and over again can lead people to experience homelessness, or to deal with any number of untreated mental health issues, or to struggle with substance use disorder," she said.

"I sometimes think there's an expectation that if Groundworks is working with people that they would no longer be in public view," Bennett said. "And that's not accurate. I've been in meetings where people have said, 'Why are people congregating?'"

"There's nowhere for us to tell people to go," Bennett said. "There's no space in our shelter."

Meanwhile, other changes will soon increase the number of unsheltered people in Vermont.

Legislated changes to the State's General Assistance Emergency Housing Program that take effect in mid-September will likely result in more Vermonters being unsheltered, according to Chris Winters, commissioner of the Vermont Department for Children and Families.

In a report to the Selectboard on Aug. 6, Winters said that on Sept. 15 the number of available motel rooms for the program will be reduced from 1,400 to 1,100. The number of days a household can stay in a motel during the warmer months will also be limited to 80 per year.

As of July 29, 189 households were sheltering in Brattleboro area motels through the program.

'Public safety is our highest priority'

The Selectboard has made community safety one of its three major priorities for 2024 and for building the budget for fiscal year 2026.

"It's our most important work right now," said Chair Daniel Quipp.

Increased police presence downtown is one of the solutions being considered by the Selectboard.

While the BPD has been "putting a lot of hours into downtown," according to Assistant Police Chief Evans, some meeting participants called for ramping up the police presence downtown.

Selectboard member Franz Reichsman wondered whether the town needs to enlarge the police force or put a police substation at the transportation center. "I would like to see officers on foot and bicycles downtown a lot more," he said.

Town Manager John Potter told the Selectboard that he would bring proposals to the board for consideration as the town develops its fiscal year 2026 budget.

"We know that tax increases are not something you guys want to do," Potter said. "And so we're reluctant to do too much in that area."

At the conclusion of the July 23 meeting, Potter listed topics for discussion at future Selectboard meetings.

These next steps include a review of the town's security services at the transportation center, which Potter acknowledged were not as "effective as we would like."

Potter said that he would like the board to plan a second annual Community Safety Fair with a forum for social service providers to share their work with the community.

Additionally, he will invite Turning Point to an upcoming meeting to update the board on the organization's substance-use and addiction-recovery support services.

The town's Human Services Committee will be included in an upcoming board meeting to discuss the allocation of human services funding by the town.

Brattleboro invests close to half a million dollars in area human services, according to Potter. "We need to understand how we can work together and collaborate with the Human Services Committee to potentially direct that [funding] to some of the areas that we're seeing from a data standpoint," he said.

Potter is also forming a collaborative leadership team comprised of public safety and public health officials to focus on better coordination of services driven by data.

Wentworth and Bennett see the benefits of more collaboration.

"There are a lot of agencies working on issues that intersect in this conversation," said Bennett. "The more we share information and the more we build those relationships, the more we're able to address the problems."

"But these are problems that have taken decades to get us to this point, and there's no quick fix in terms of all of the many systems at play here," she cautioned.

"Brattleboro is deeply devoted to its people and its community," said Wentworth. "And that's one of the reasons why I think we are shining the light on this need to collaborate.

"There has always been collaboration, but there's there's probably a need for more partners to join in this collaboration because it's definitely an all-hands-on-deck kind of scenario."

'Safety zones' under consideration

The Selectboard continued the discussion of public safety at its Aug. 6 meeting, taking up the topic of "safety zones"

Town Manager John Potter listed some of the "unacceptable' behaviors that the public has brought to his attention, including use of intoxicating beverages or drugs, urination and defecation, damaging property, lighting fires, physical aggression, using profane or abusive language, face-to-face solicitation for money, appearing unconscious, storing belongings beyond a carry load, gathering in groups, and participating in encampments.

This News item by Ellen Pratt was written for The Commons.