State and local officials told a rowdy audience what they could, couldn’t and were trying to do about crime Thursday.
A crowd that looked to number in the hundreds packed Rutland’s Paramount Theatre for a forum that featured members of the law enforcement community discussing what laws tied their hands and the Rutland County Legislative delegation talking about the changes they were trying to make to help.
The event was also attended by most of the Board of Aldermen, some state legislators from outside Rutland County and Gov. Phil Scott, who did not address the crowd but sat and listened through the two-hour session.
The panelists were read questions submitted in advance, though numerous questions and comments were shouted by audience members who directed vitriol at the people on stage and at each other. One woman repeatedly shouted about “the hotels,” demanding they be shut down and attributing the current crime rate to the state program housing homeless people.
The event was moderated by Sen. Brian Collamore, R-Rutland County, who opened by noting Vermont saw eight homicides statewide in October and that people in Rutland had grown increasingly frustrated with the “catch-and-release” of lower-level offenders.
“The current situation is not one that bodes well for the public to feel safe,” he said. “I talk to neighbors every day that are tired and worried and upset.”
Collamore said blame did not lie with local police who were doing their jobs diligently — which drew loud applause and some quieter grumblings of disagreement. He similarly said he did not blame prosecutors or judges — the latter triggering cries of “disagree” along with some more vulgar dissents.
Moving on, Collamore placed all the blame on the Legislature.
“We make the laws,” he said. “If they need to change, they need to change.”
Mayor Michael Doenges fended off angry attempts at interrogation from the crowd about his decision to limit the event to questions submitted in advance, displaying a QR code through which people could submit additional questions and comments. He then ran through current crime statistics, noting a rise in retail theft in which 75% of offenders were known substance abusers and 30% are repeat offenders.
Much of the discussion through the evening returned to the difficulties in locking up those offenders or otherwise getting them to stop offending.
Police Chief Brian Kilcullen said his department’s authority was limited and the law constrained them in some ways that not many people realized. One example he pointed to was complaints of people stealing from cars.
Kilcullen said police could — and had — catch someone “going through” another person’s car, but if they got there before anything was stolen, the land the car was on was not posted and the person had not been noticed against trespass, no crime had been committed.
Kilcullen also said that 87% of car thefts were from unlocked cars and that people could protect themselves by locking their cars. This led to numerous shouts from the crowd that such measures were not the public’s responsibility.
Kilcullen also talked about how police would arrest someone for retail theft and serve them with a notice against trespassing for the store only for them to return to the store the next day. Police might arrest the person for trespassing, Kilcullen said, and see them come back yet again the day after that.
Rutland County State’s Attorney Ian Sullivan said the court system stopped holding jury trials during the COVID-19 pandemic, bringing numerous cases to a standstill and creating a backlog that was exacerbated by his office’s staffing shortage.
With larger, more violent crimes taking priority as they work to clear that backlog, people with charges no more serious shoplifting and trespassing remained on the streets, able to continue their activities until their cases come due.
“Those things never escalate,” Kilcullen said. “They stay misdemeanors.”
That could change, according to Rep. William Notte, D-Rutland, under a bill before the Vermont House that would allow prosecutors to combine similar misdemeanor offenses committed over a limited period of time into a single felony.
“Someone found guilty of those crimes is held more accountable,” he said. “It addresses our court backlog because if someone has eight misdemeanor charges and it’s consolidated into one, that frees up a lot.”
Notte said the backlog would also be helped by getting someone to fill the vacant position for a second criminal court judge in Rutland County, and that the Legislature was looking at ways to streamline the nominating process.
Meanwhile, Rep. Thomas Burditt, R-West Rutland, said he and Collamore were working on companion bills to address the car-theft loophole. Burditt said legislators were also looking at ways to make it easier to have people held pre-trial, and warned of a bill that has emerged from the Senate into the House that would make it harder still for judges to impose bail.
Rutland City Police Cmdr. Matthew Prouty, the executive director of Project VISION, said the organization that was created to bridge the gaps between the law enforcement and social service communities had been damaged by the pandemic.
“A lot of our partners retreated into their silos with remote work, and we were not working well,” he said. “We were focused on things that were not meeting immediate issues.”
Prouty said the organization needed to back up and focus on “life-saving stuff.”
“We see a lot of stuff on social media,” he said. “If preservation of life isn’t your primary interest, we don’t want you in public safety.”
Prouty said preventative work was important as was intervention — challenging for a department that might only have four officers available at times when they once would have had six. Prouty said police identify the most active offenders and pay close attention to him, a process that has resulted in days when he just parks outside known drug houses.
“There wasn’t much I could do, but man I saw a lot of stuff getting thrown out the window,” he said.
Prouty said they were also checking in on the local homeless population.
“Sometimes, when you meet one need with an individual, that takes a whole lot of calls off our call volume,” he said.
Prouty also said the department had benefited from having probation officers assigned to it because they were often aware of what suspects should and should not have been doing in ways police were not. Alan Cormier, chief of operations at the Vermont Department of Corrections, said this was something his department was looking to restore as it grappled with its own staffing problems.
Offering some good news, Cormier said programs in the prison system, such as retooled job training and offering in-facility medically assisted drug treatment, appeared to be paying off. Recidivism rates for people coming out of Vermont prisons had dropped, he said, from 44% to 23%.
Interviewed after the event, Scott said that he would veto the bill against which Burditt had warned if it got to his desk in its current form, and that he was interviewing candidates for the Rutland judicial seat with the hope of an announcement in the next two weeks.
The governor said he was impressed by the passion on display and that he felt the current situation showed a pendulum had swung too far on criminal justice reform, away from accountability.
“The issues that were brought up are not unique to Rutland but are exacerbated by many underlying issues,” he said. “We have some ideas that were maybe reinforced here tonight, but it takes the Legislature to work with us. There’s been some resistance.”
gordon.dritschilo
@rutlandherald.com
