Are you now, or have you ever been, a card-carrying member of the Communist Party? If so, don’t even think about applying for a job as a Burlington cop.

In addition to the usual background queries included on the PHI, or “personal history information,” section of the Burlington Police Department job application  — along with aliases, bankruptcies, criminal convictions, past and present drug use, dishonorable military discharges, and (yes, this is true) every crime you’ve ever committed since the age of 10 — question 48 asks the following: 

“ARE YOU A MEMBER OF, OR HAVE YOU EVER BEEN A MEMBER OF, ANY COMMUNIST OR SUBVERSIVE ORGANIZATION OR ANY POLITICAL PARTY OR ORGANIZATION WHICH ADVOCATES THE OVERTHROW OF OUR CONSTITUTIONAL FORM OF GOVERNMENT IN THE UNITED STATES?

Whoa… Did I just back my DeLorean into a temporal vortex and land in the 1950s?

Nope. Evidently, the Burlington PD wants to know whether its job applicants have a fondness for Marx, Lenin, Castro or Kim Il Sung.

Got something to say?

Send a letter to the editor and we'll publish your feedback in print!

Staff Writer Ken Picard is a senior staff writer at Seven Days. A Long Island, N.Y., native who moved to Vermont from Missoula, Mont., he was hired in 2002 as Seven Days’ first staff writer, to help create a news department. Ken has since won numerous...

6 replies on “Burlington Police Department: Communists Need Not Apply”

  1. This explains why communism never took hold in Burlington. Seriously though, how can an organization that does not respect the rights and privacy of their own members (list every crime you’ve ever committed since the age of 10) be expected to respect the rights and privacy of the citizens? Answer: it can’t.

  2. Burlington police are pretty harmless. What do you have to do to get on their bad side?

  3. I have no problem with the Burlington police wanting to exclude from its ranks people who ADVOCATE THE OVERTHROW OF OUR CONSTITUTIONAL FORM OF GOVERNMENT.

  4. Sounds like anyone that supports the current yahoo’s in DC is ineligible for the job, since the constitution is subverted in a regular basis. Heck our commander in chief isn’t eligible to be a BPO.

  5. Disagree. He isn’t advocating for the overthrow of our constitutional form of government.

  6. Your ignorance is only superseded by your inability to comprehend the basic similarity between the GOP and the Democrats.

Comments are closed.