From the Publisher: Burlington Blues 

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• Photos Courtesy Of Eric Olsen
• Used syringes and trash outside Memorial Auditorium in Burlington

I got an email from a Burlington business owner thanking Seven Days for last week's story about Wayne Savage, a freelance photographer who has spent decades shooting crime scenes for Vermont news outlets. With a police scanner affixed to his ear, Savage hears most emergency calls in the area and responds to many — often gettting there first. To report the story, Seven Days' Courtney Lamdin followed him to Burlington City Hall Park, where emergency medical technicians were pulling an overdosing man out of the public bathroom. While they were wheeling him to an ambulance, a second call came in about a suspected overdose across the street. That individual had already been revived with Narcan — five times — that morning.

"Burlington is so scary right now and the drug crisis is daunting," my emailer wrote, noting that her husband picks up "many, many, many needles every day."

She asked: "Why aren't people talking about this more?"

They are, in some realms. A recent "36 Hours in Burlington, Vermont" travel piece in the New York Times garnered some withering online comments about how the city has gone downhill. Local social media is abuzz with photos and videos documenting the detritus of drug use and homelessness. One Instagram account with 1,800 followers, burlington.looks.like.shxt, showed people cooking and injecting drugs in broad daylight until it disappeared from the internet on Tuesday morning.

Lots of Vermonters, who live in and outside Burlington, quietly admit they don't feel safe downtown anymore. Others note that their kids, or those of others, are no longer allowed to come into the city without adult supervision.

Seven Days and other media outlets have been covering the evolving situation, of course, from multiple angles. Last Friday, WCAX-TV broke the news that the city is threatening to shut down 184 Church Street for code violations. Courtney's story this week takes a deeper look at the apartment complex, owned by the Handy family, which generates more police calls than any other Burlington address. The troubles at 184 are at least partially responsible for the new six-foot-tall metal fence that's now behind the Chittenden Superior Court next door, Courtney's reporting shows. Price tag: $150,000. The Hilton Garden Inn is also seeking permission to put up an exterior barrier for security. The Ronald McDonald House wants to make the one it has in place even higher.

It's a matter of time before the same thing happens at Memorial Auditorium, where last week web developer and musician Eric Olsen shot and posted to Facebook photos of drug paraphernalia piled high on the entrance ramp to the city-owned building. He claimed he saw a man "receiving oral sex" there at 11 a.m. on a school day, across Main Street from Edmunds Middle School.

Yes, people are talking, but on the internet and in the privacy of their own homes. What I don't hear are citizens and city leaders speaking up in an organized, forceful way to say the policies we have in place are not working. The emperor is not only naked, he just took a dump in front of the old YMCA.

Our problems may be the same as those in cities — especially progressive-minded ones — across the country, but the number of lost souls per capita in Burlington is staggering. There are times of day on Church Street when it seems like more people are in the throes of substance abuse, mental illness or both than those going about the business of working, shopping and eating.

It's impossible to calculate the extent to which this crisis is damaging our beautiful burg. Or whether it's temporary or permanent.

I live in Burlington and do a lot of walking, often when it's starting to get dark. At the beginning of the summer, I noticed the lights weren't working on the top block of the pedestrian promenade along Battery Street. There were people sleeping on benches on both sides of the walkway, and I thought twice about striding down the middle, without being able to see. I kept going and emerged unscathed, then forgot to call the Burlington Electric Department the next day. By the time I remembered, I figured somebody else must have done it.

But the lights were still out — or out again? — when I walked the same route at dusk a few weeks ago. This time I reported the problem on the city's SeeClickFix platform and followed up with a phone call to the electric department. It took a few weeks to see results, but the lights are once again operational. And now I'm getting every related citizen SeeClickFix report in my email inbox. So many posts about syringes.

It's an illuminating window on the city — shattered and dirty but still somehow holding together. Fences might help, but they won't fix these problems. Does anyone know what will?