Working together with Mayor Emma Mulvaney-Stanak, interim Police Chief Shawn Burke and the Burlington Police Department are making steady progress at improving community safety in the Queen City. Recently they’ve gotten help from Gov. Phil Scott.
This has been having meaningful impacts downtown, which is encouraging news for the state’s largest city. In an interview in her office, Mayor Mulvaney-Stanak said, “We’ve been implementing lots of new measures that are improving our downtown, with a strong focus on making it a safe space for everyone and investing in the vibrancy of our city.”
Violent crime in downtown Burlington is trending down in 2025, according to data that Chief Burke shared with the Burlington Police Commission in October. Gunfire incidents are also down significantly from a 2022 spike, he said. Downtown foot patrols have increased and have already surpassed the totals of any in the previous five years.
And there’s more: Burke noted that the BPD has identified the top 20 individuals who have the most frequent contacts with officers downtown. Those 20 individuals alone are collectively responsible for 842 incidents, ranging from 26 to 108 each. All but one of these individuals struggle with being unsheltered, highlighting the significant need for broader responses and resources to address root causes of harm.
Burlington’s trifecta of homelessness, substance-use disorder, and untreated mental health requires fresh thinking. The mayor and chief are collaborating with community partners to create a broad community safety strategy that draws from Burlington’s community-based policing as well as holistic approaches.
Burke told the police commission: “We hope we can get people to … try to engage meaningfully in services, so they’re not living on the street, engaged and entrenched in this criminal and antisocial behavior.”
The Situation Table Broadens the Conversation
A recent innovation the city is using to address underlying risk is an approach called the Situation Table. This was developed in Saskatchewan, Canada, in 2011 and has since spread to dozens of communities throughout the U.S., including eight in Vermont.
It essentially gathers representatives from law enforcement and social service agencies on a weekly basis to address the needs of individuals or families with complex cases — people struggling with mental health and substance-use disorders, families that can’t find stable housing, and people who frequently contact first responders because they have no one else to call.
“Nearly 40 social service agencies have regularly attended the weekly Situation Table since we launched it in July,” Mulvaney-Stanak said. “All the right players are there to assist individual cases, figure out ways to collaborate, and then work relentlessly to reduce the risk levels for the individuals or families.”
The benefits of this approach, she said, include proactively addressing risks before they escalate into more severe harm; improving accountability; and more effective coordination and resource sharing across city agencies, service providers and community systems.
In September, Chief Burke told Vermont Public that the model had so far been effective at solving short-term, acute issues.
The Mayor Is Engaging the Governor
For the past year, Mayor Mulvaney-Stanak has maintained that Burlington’s complex challenges require thoughtful partnership with state agencies and the judiciary. In October, the mayor, Chief Burke and other city officials met with Gov. Scott and his team to explore opportunities to collaboratively address community safety. The resulting short-term action plan, which was announced by the governor on October 23, is a good step forward for Burlington.
As a key part of the plan, a special prosecutor was appointed to handle a significant backlog of criminal cases in Chittenden County through a newly-established Community Accountability Court with its own judge. The hope is that this court can improve community accountability, resolve cases, support victims, and connect people to services and opportunities for rehabilitation.
The Interim Chief Focuses on Recruitment
Burke stepped into the interim chief role in March, though he already knew the department well — he’d served the Queen City as an officer for 21 years, until retiring from the force in 2018 as the deputy chief of police. He then led the South Burlington Police Department for six and a half years before returning to Burlington.
Sitting in his North Avenue office, he observed that the BPD was founded in 1865 and is celebrating its 160th year. The past few, though, have been rough: Retention had long been difficult for the department — an industry problem faced by law enforcement throughout the country — and in 2019, the BPD faced several high-profile controversies that strained public trust. In 2020, budget cuts and a 30 percent reduction in force followed the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis and subsequent racial justice protests around the country. In Burlington, this included a monthlong encampment in Battery Park and nightly marches through the city demanding that the department fire three officers who were subjects named in use-of-force lawsuits.
In the years since, the BPD’s officer ranks have remained low, and attracting new recruits has continued to be difficult. In June 2020, there were 92 officers in the department; there are just 59 sworn officers on the job today.
Recruitment has thus been a priority. Crucially, Burke has bolstered the department’s social media efforts, resulting in an increase in applications: The department has already received more to date in 2025 than it logged in all of 2024. Also important have been college and other career fairs in the region in order to make local connections – Chief Burke has said a police department needs its residents to serve in order to resemble the community. The $15,000 sign-on bonus may have helped, too.
Burke is seeking officers who are creative, flexible and eager to respond to a wide variety of service calls. In line with the city’s commitment to community policing, officers should be able to work with community support personnel and, importantly, be equipped to de-escalate challenging situations. “If you love problem solving, this is the most fascinating job in the world,” he said. “You learn a lot about the community and use that to be proactive and collaborative in order to effectively address harm.”
An Officer Works Toward Proactive Policing
It’s a job that appeals to Officer John Meierdiercks. In many ways, Meierdiercks seems like a nontraditional cop. The 37-year-old St. Johnsbury native came to Burlington in 2006 to study English literature at the University of Vermont. He has a reference to James Joyce’s Ulysses, “agenbite of inwit,” tattooed on his left forearm. “It means ‘the remorse of conscience,’” he explained during a September conversation in front of city hall.
After graduating in 2010, Meierdiercks rolled sushi for Mao Mizushima, who at the time supplied City Market. He followed a girlfriend to Tucson, Ariz., and worked in a group home for kids who were wards of the state, where he enjoyed being a case manager.
On his return to Vermont, he took a job with Howard Center. His caseload consisted largely of young men with various degrees of mental illness, which meant that he interacted regularly with the street outreach teams and the BPD.
“I think, even when I was in my twenties, I was anti-cop,” Meierdiercks confessed. But after he had more interactions with law enforcement, especially dealing with people who were experiencing significant behavioral health challenges, his views evolved to consider how officers could be supportive in these situations.
When the BPD’s hiring freeze was lifted in 2021, Meierdiercks was the first one to join the force. He said he most enjoys doing proactive policing — being downtown, getting to know people — rather than jumping from call to call to call across the city, which is unfortunately what happens when the department is short-staffed.
“I like doing drug work a lot,” he said, in part because fentanyl hit Burlington “like a scourge … It’s really the center and the source of all the other problems. I like to try to address that as much as I can, with the tools I have.”
Meierdiercks likes policing, in part, because “it’s a really good mixture of using your body, using your brain,” he said. “It’s important to have both of them tuned and ready to go, because you need both of them to do this job.”
There really isn’t anything else like it, he said. “You see horrendous things; you see really beautiful things. You see people at their lowest and people at their peak.”
He cited the example of a longtime acquaintance who’d had mental health issues and was further destabilized by drugs and homelessness. The man disappeared. When Meierdiercks ran into him recently, he was clear-eyed and clear-headed, with a girlfriend and a job.
Sometimes people do get better.
