Burlington Police Chief Brandon del Pozo and Mayor Miro Weinberger are spearheading a new effort to respond to opiate abuse. File photo by Morgan True / VTDigger
BURLINGTON — Mayor Miro Weinberger and Police Chief Brandon del Pozo are quietly trying to gather support to fight the city’s opiate crisis in a different way: using data as a tool.
The data-driven approach would be based on the Compstat model developed by New York City Police Commissioner William Bratton in the mid-1990s. The management tool is widely credited with reducing crime and improving the quality of life in the Big Apple.
Del Pozo, who worked for the NYPD for 18 years starting in 1997, had a front row seat to Compstat’s implementation. He said the model has been successfully adapted to improve the delivery of government services far beyond policing.
Most notably, former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, who was also the mayor of Baltimore, adopted the approach in both his former roles. The initiatives he started endure in Baltimore’s Citistat office and Maryland’s Office of Performance Improvement.
“When people hear ‘data’ they think of an academic exercise, but nothing could be further from the truth,” del Pozo said.
There are four basic steps to the model.
- Timely and accurate information gathering.
- Development of effective responses.
- Rapid deployment of resources.
- Relentless follow-up and assessment of outcomes.
However, without timely and accurate information, del Pozo said, the other management steps are hobbled. Currently, the city, police and the other stakeholders don’t have the data they need to effectively respond to a surge in opiate-related crime and the correlated public health crisis of overdoses and overdose deaths, del Pozo said.
“The main metric that people talk about in Vermont and in our city is the size of the waiting list (for opiate treatment), but that doesn’t give us a window into whether our efforts are successful or not,” he said.
The wait for treatment at the Chittenden Clinic, which averages close to a year, is a visible measure of the region’s opiate crisis, but Bob Bick, CEO of Howard Center, which operates the clinic, has described the list as being similar to the visible portion of an iceberg — meaning the true extent of the problem is hidden from view.
Del Pozo said he would like to track measures such as the median age of people when they first use opiates, the time between first use and when a person voluntarily seeks treatment, and how quickly addicts released from prison come back in contact with the criminal justice system.
The later group faces a unique set of challenges when it comes to treatment and recovery, VTDigger found in a recent special report.
Burlington’s opiate initiative would also focus on sharing information among stakeholders about the challenges individual addicts are facing, including lack of treatment, housing or job skills, del Pozo said.
To gather and share such information, and to use it to formulate an effective response, the initiative needs the participation of a variety of entities, Weinberger and del Pozo said. That includes state agencies and departments, Howard Center, the University of Vermont Medical Center and other treatment providers and social service nonprofits.
Since October, Weinberger has worked with those entities in an effort to bring down the Chittenden Clinic waiting list. Those meetings led to greater participation in opiate treatment from the hospital, but they also “really laid bare” the need for a broader, more coordinated approach to the opiate crisis, Weinberger said.
He compared the city’s planned initiative to Project Vision in Rutland, which has brought together an array of groups, led by the city and police, to try to curb opiate use and its harm to quality of life.
The mayor pointed out that the state has been a key player in implementing Project Vision, a widely hailed success story.
Burlington plans to hire one or two employees whose sole responsibility will be to track data related to the opiate crisis, help coordinate the city response and ensure that the follow-up and reassessment occurs to determine what’s working.
Weinberger said he did not yet have a cost estimate for the program.
Burlington may use part of a $4.2 million surplus to hire staff, but Weinberger said he will also seek state funding. Much of the surplus is already spoken for, with $1.3 million likely to go toward the city’s capital plan. The mayor is also keen on keeping a rainy day fund for unexpected costs.
On Dec. 23, the day after a suspected heroin dealer was killed in a federal drug raid in Burlington’s Old North End, Weinberger sent a text to del Pozo relaying a message he’d just sent to Gov. Peter Shumlin.
In it he referenced T.J. Donovan, the Chittenden County state’s attorney, and Dr. Harry Chen, state health commissioner.
“Gov — busy day in BTV with the opiate crisis. The two big take home points from the TJ meeting were: 1) TJ knows Compstat and fully supports it as the right model for this problem; 2) TJ’s last effort didn’t really work because it was under-resourced,” the message to Shumlin reads.
“Let’s not make that mistake again. As you said, the challenge here is not really about the money — let’s not waste a lot of time chasing it or chiseling while the problem deepens and kids get hooked. We have the right, proven model, and Brandon is the guy to stand it up (with Chen next to him and you overseeing the effort). Let’s make this happen — you will not regret it.”
Shumlin spokesman Scott Coriell said Weinberger and del Pozo can count on support from administration officials, but he stated Burlington won’t get any additional state money for its initiative.
“The governor’s staff, Health Commissioner Harry Chen and others have been working for months to aid Burlington in the development of this plan,” Coriell said in an email.
“Just like the Vision program in Rutland, we’re going to commit staff resources to aid Burlington’s effort. Vision in Rutland does not receive additional state funding, nor will the program in Burlington,” he said.
Chittenden County State’s Attorney T.J. Donovan speaks at a news conference. File photo by John Herrick/VTDigger
Efforts toward a better coordinated response to the opiate epidemic in the region are nascent and still being formulated, Donovan said in a recent interview.
“The last thing we need is to duplicate efforts,” he said. Burlington’s Compstat-based initiative, Donovan said, will be one piece of a larger state-led effort to foster a more careful analytical approach to the opiate epidemic.
“We need to get a better sense of the scope of this problem and what interventions are working,” Donovan said.
At the community level, in Burlington, it makes sense for the police to lead the initiative, he added, and del Pozo’s experience with the NYPD’s Compstat model will serve the city well.
Frequently, police on the beat make the first contact with drug users, and 60 percent of the cases Donovan prosecutes as county state’s attorney originate with the Burlington Police Department, he said.
Donovan said a previous effort led by his office to bring a data-driven approach to the opiate crisis never reached its full potential because it lacked funding. His office hired a person to track data related to the broader opiate crisis in 2010 or 2011, but they were never able to focus exclusively on data or the bigger picture, he said.
Such initiatives are prone to “mission creep,” and the staffer was eventually spread too thin. The person’s role morphed into that of essentially a caseworker, who jumped from crisis to crisis, seeking to help individual drug users avert disaster, Donovan said.
“To take a data-driven approach you need a dedicated person, and with my guy the priority became people in crisis,” he said. The lesson from that effort, Donovan said, is that success depends on having the necessary staff.
“I can’t stress enough that in this county it comes down to dedicated resources, which means people, people who are dedicated to just this job,” he said.
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