The joint Police Commission and Public Safety City Council committee are attempting to salvage a report that aimed to gather community feedback on the future of the Burlington Police Department.
The report, produced by consulting firm Talitha Consults, is one of two analyses that make up the much-anticipated functional and operational assessment of the BPD. After the City Council voted to cut the police department’s staffing levels by 30% last summer through officer attrition, it elected to commission assessments of the department to determine its future structure — one would focus on the police department internally; the other would focus on collecting community feedback.
Talitha was charged with collecting community feedback, which included a virtual survey and multiple listening sessions with the community to determine how Burlingtonians wanted their police force to look.
But Skyler Nash, a public policy and research analyst for the city’s Racial Equity, Inclusion and Belonging Department, told members of the joint committee Wednesday night that the report provided to the city lacked value, comprehensive feedback and did not meet key expectations laid out in the city’s contract with Talitha.
“Once we reviewed the final report,” he said, “we started to notice that there were things that were left out that we were expecting to have at the end of this process. And big parts of this contract that we were expecting to have.”
When VTDigger reached Charis May Hnin, principal of Talitha Consults, by phone after the meeting, she said that the critiques of the report were “all lies” and that city employees were attempting to “defame” her and her consulting firm.
She said she wants members of the joint committee to release the report to the public to let them decide if it’s “a good report or bad report.”
Talitha Consults was paid $38,850 from the city’s Public Safety Transformation fund to complete this part of the assessment. The city is expecting to receive the second part of the BPD assessment this fall from CNA Consulting.
The report is not being released to the public because, as Police Commission member Stephanie Seguino told VTDigger after the meeting, the city is attempting to organize the disaggregated data by identity group that the firm provided in a raw format. Releasing it as is would not be easily understandable to the public, she said. The joint committee is going to work with the Racial Equity, Inclusion and Belonging Department’s interns to finish analyzing the data and sort it into tables and then write an executive summary of the report themselves. It’s expected to be finished by the end of next week.
But there are questions remaining about whether the data is comprehensive enough to use.
Nash shared concerns with the committee that the demographics of those who responded to the survey were not representative of the city. Seguino, who is also a professor of economics at the University of Vermont, said at one point during the meeting that 42% of survey respondents had a masters degree but only 21% of Burlington residents have the same level of education.
She said the city did request that Talitha send disaggregated identity data — mobility, race, age, socioeconomic status — of those who did respond to the survey for interns in the Racial Equity, Inclusion and Belonging Department office to analyze and add to the report.
Nash said Talitha was supposed to also include a plan for a “transparent, accessible, sustainable platform for community input” into the city’s first responder system, which was not included in the final report.
His office had also expected Burlington-specific recommendations and tools for responders, methods to assess service equity, “culturally grounded” materials that reflect the community, recommendations for implementing these plans complete with a budget, a schedule spanning many years and tools to evaluate these systems.
“Once we received the final report, instead of the comprehensive program description, it was just limited to bullet point recommendations that were later expanded in the final report,” Nash said.
But the expansions were also lackluster. He pointed to one of the bullet points recommending that the city implement “an integrated public safety response system for crises involving mental illness, homelessness and addiction.” He said the report expands on this to say that the city should consider implementing a CAHOOTS response system — an initiative originally developed in Oregon that employs medics and crisis workers instead of police to respond to sensitive calls.
Nash said this program is already well known to those in the city who are assessing how to better emergency response systems and that it doesn’t provide value.
He said the other recommendations include that the city should launch a partnership between all first responders, the BPD should improve existing communication channels and strive for better community participation in public safety planning.
He said Talitha recommended bettering relationships between the BPD and youth in the city. He said they attempted to address the issue of school resource officers in schools — although Nash said Talitha incorrectly identified them as “CSOs,” or community service officer positions, which are positions being added to the BPD.
He also pointed out that the “SRO issue” has been “extensively litigated” in the city. The Burlington School District elected to scale back the use of SROs in schools in spring.
While his office does have access to unorganized qualitative data from the community survey results and in-person feedback sessions, there are inconsistencies in it. Nash said there are some inconsistencies in how respondents answered some of the survey questions, signifying that they didn’t understand them. He said some of the data was presented incorrectly.
He said not all data from every public, community discussion was incorporated into the report and that his team found that some answers were also duplicated.
“And so all of that together starts to raise a lot of questions about how much weight that you can put on the data that you’ve received,” Nash said.
Hnin provided the approximately 30-page report to VTDigger for review. There is analysis of the responses the firm received in surveys and public meetings. However, only about 800 community members completed the survey with their responses. About 1,700 started the survey but did not finish. The report included that 71% of survey respondents were white and that 81% had incomes of $75,000 or above.
Nash said that when the omissions and issues with the data were identified, his office attempted to communicate with Talitha and correct the issue.
“It was a very difficult process to kind of go back and forth,” Nash said. “Every time we saw a new error or omission in the report as we were combing through, it was hard to get straight answers about some of the things that we were hoping to address.”
“So, ultimately, no,” he said, “I don’t think they were able to be addressed effectively.”
Nash told VTDigger after the meeting that when his office reached out to Talitha to address some of these issues, they were told that the “budget had been exhausted” and that if there was further work the city wanted Talitha to complete, they would have to extend the budget.
When reached by VTDigger, Hnin said that this was not true.
Seguino said she doesn’t think the report is entirely useless. She said the pandemic affected how much data Talitha was able to collect and that completing this work remotely led to the lack of representative data.
In looking through some of the responses herself, she said they did seem to reflect what commissioners and councilors have been hearing in the community anecdotally — that social services need to be increased and supported in the city to help those caught up in a punitive criminal justice system.
“I see a body of work that will move us forward,” Seguino told VTDigger after the meeting. “Is it what I ideally would have liked? Given the fact that I’m an academic, I might want to see a more sophisticated format. But I think it’s enough.”
The lackluster report follows the departure of Kyle Dodson, who was widely criticized for ending his six-month stint as director of police transformation in the city with a final report that was largely plagiarized.
Read the story on VTDigger here: Consulting firm’s assessment of Burlington Police has major omissions and errors, analyst says.