Burlington police initiate door-to-door discussion of illegal drugs

[23536]

http://www.burlingtonfreepress.com/...discussion-of-illegal-drugs-Vermont-addiction

Burlington Police officers knocked on doors Wednesday afternoon to talk to citizens about illegal drugs in their neighborhoods.

These initiated conversation were part of the police force’s renewed effort to reduce drug use and related crimes.

“You want to gain information about any possible criminal activity and you want to send a message,” Chittenden County State’s Attorney T.J. Donovan said Thursday. “There are people out there who are suffering from drug addiction who we want to help. But at the same time, if people are out there selling heroin, cocaine, hard drugs, we’re going to prosecute you.”

Burlington police spearheaded the knock and talk accompanied by state and federal law enforcement agencies. They handed out nearly 500 letters that explained their tactics, urged citizens to call in tips and implored folks involved in illegal drug activity to get out and seek help.

“IF YOU ARE OR HAVE BEEN INVOLVED in crime or drug dealing or are addicted to narcotics and want it to stop DO NOT HESITATE TO CALL FOR HELP,” read part of the two-page letter, which used all capital letters for emphasis.

People in search of such help, it suggested, could call the Street Outreach Team, a group staffed by HowardCenter employees who work with, but are not, police officers.

The letter also warned folks willingly involved in illegal drug activity to brace for prosecution in both state and federal courts.

“If you bring drugs into Vermont from out of state, the full resources of the federal justice system will be brought to bear,” it states.

cont. http://www.burlingtonfreepress.com/...discussion-of-illegal-drugs-Vermont-addiction

 

[mal3volent]

Finally! A convenient way to turn myself over to the cops without having to drive all the way to the police station.

 

[What 23]

Yea I'd totally answer my door.

We want to help! If you don't let us "help", we want to prosecute you!

 

[my3rdeye]

If some cop knocked at my door to chat about drugs I would tell him to go out and fight crime like I pay them too. That's your chance to lecture them for a change. In a dark alley when they found your drugs is not that time, but knocking on your door is a perfect chance to tell them you oppose the use of your tax dollars to oppress people under bullshit laws.
I take every chance I get to express my displeasure with drug laws to police. It was really fun disrupting their info session on how to tell if your neighbour is growing weed. They get so mad but they can't beat you up in public.

 

[naughtynicknails]

Would love for the police to try and educate me on drugs and drug policy.

The pupil would become the teacher from the second knock

 

[MyDoorsAreOpen]

Cops are well trained on how to recognize even the subtlest of body language in somebody made nervous or uncomfortable by what they're talking about. I bet the Burlington police department is making a big map of the city, with every house where someone gave the wrong vibe to the cops at the 'knock and talk' was marked as a [potential] target for closer police scrutiny.

This could play out in subtle ways the public would never be able to prove. For example, let's say a new internal policy at the Burlington Police Department was created whereby all nighttime noise complaints were secretly filtered through an upper-level officer who possessed the only copy of this city map, whose very existence was top secret and known only to a select few top-level cops. He could look to see if the address on the map had been marked during the knock and talk rounds, and decide based on that to urge the dispatched officers to have a high or low threshold for finding a pretext to search the place. If a rumor ever leaked that this map and the project it enabled existed, abort the mission and burn the map, and then deny, deny, deny. Be sure to remind any disgruntled rats that take their sad stories of the predatory police tactics they were forced to partake in to the vibrant liberal rant rags, that they have absolutely no proof, and that they will pay for their slanderous mouths with their livelihoods.

This is a soft version of exactly how things goes down in politically unstable totalitarian states. Somebody part of some armed force in support of some leader or cause arrives in a town with his battalion and knocks on a random door, and asks whoever answers some pretty pointed questions about who he supports. Often one nervous dart of an eye or twitch of a facial muscle, one quaver or hesitation in responding, is all it takes to get dragged away, tortured and/or killed. Because even if you had nothing against the militia or what or who they were fighting for, what they did to you would still serve as a chilling example for the whole village. Incidents like this get written up in international liberal presses as "senseless" and "wanton", but in reality they're anything but -- they're as cold-blooded as can be, but they serve a very strategic purpose.

So, going back to the lighter side of First World Problems™, this seems like the police in Burlington, Vermont sending a clear message: "If you use drugs, you have every reason to fear us, because we know where you live, and you're not safe from our predation even in your own home." This may be a very clever, long-term-oriented strategy on the part of an institution whose lifeblood is fines extracted from drug possessors. Sure, in the short term, it'll be a net cost in money and man-hours to comb neighborhoods knocking on doors and giving lectures. But if it influences public attitudes and opinion in the long run such that that a small but statistically significant lower percentage of Burlington teens try drugs, because of a well-established fear that the police are waiting to pounce on them as soon as they do, then the city saves face and attracts federal grants.

I lived in Burlington, Vermont for 9 months. It's a wealthy little city, but more importantly one with a strikingly equitable distribution of wealth for an American city of its size. I saw neither opulent wealth nor destitute poverty in my time there, really. It's also a city with a well-known reputation as an oasis of liberal attitudes toward drugs. Both of these attributes stem historically, I think, from the city's remoteness and the fact that it never industrialized and thus never attracted a large migrant Black or immigrant white working class with staunchly traditional values. This creates an environment somewhat rare in urban America today where there's an unusually low amount of skepticism toward unprecedented and unusual projects, public or private, and at the same time an unusually low level of historically-ingrained mistrust between the police and the citizenry. The police and the city government have realized that they can play the "This is Vermont, let's try something bold and different!" game too. And they can use it effectively to both combat an embarrassing reputation as a drug mecca, and tap a large source of revenue right in their backyards. All in the name of being progressive.

Clever. Very clever.
The only problem is, as I've said a million times, there are many things that fly in Vermont that fly pretty much nowhere else in the nation, because the state is everything most of the US is not: remote and sparsely populated with a homogeneous population that has very little deprivation.

 

[Pretty_Diamonds]

Oh gosh, that sounds horrible!