Introduction
The Department of Public Safety (DPS) contracted with Crime Research Group, Inc. (CRG) to conduct data analysis for departments involved with the Public Safety Enhancement Team. The purpose of the analysis is to help departments understand their data and to find places where community partners may intervene to help community members and reduce calls to the police.
St. Johnsbury
St. Johnsbury’s police, fire, and emergency management services are coordinated through a single dispatch center that utilizes the Valcour Computer-Aided Dispatch and Records Management System. The Vermont State Police (VSP) also patrol and respond to calls in the St. Johnsbury area. CRG did not use the Fire Department (FD) data because the calls for service types were not helpful for this analysis. VSP, CALEX, and the St. Johnsbury Police Department (SJPD) approved of the analysis CRG completed. This report combines what was learned from all three agencies.
Data Provided
The SJPD provided data on 22,704 calls for service from 2020 through August 2024. Address entries in Valcour, a free-text field, often appeared in multiple variations—for example, the police department’s address had five different permutations in the data. CRG performed light data cleaning and geocoded the standardized addresses using Google. A file containing latitude and longitude coordinates for all cleaned addresses will be provided to SJPD for all departments addresses contributing to this analysis. Notably, two of the top 10 addresses for quality of life incidents were the police department and the town offices/dispatch center. To improve data accuracy, the SJPD should prioritize consistent recording of call addresses
St. Johnsbury dispatch provided a total of 13,672 calls for service in the CALEX service area. CRG filtered those calls for services only in St. Johnsbury, resulting in 10,254 observations from January 1, 2020 through September 19, 2024. The data include the date and time of the call, type of call, origin of call, location, incident number, primary officer involved, and whether or not drugs were involved.
The Vermont State Police provided an extract of calls for services within St. Johnsbury from September 2021-September 2024. There were 6,241 calls for service.
Types of Calls
What types of calls does SJPD respond to?
SJPD recorded calls to 125 different call types over the study period. The call types are developed by the agency. The tables below show all the call types the agency recorded. The most common call type was a traffic stop, followed by a suspicious event. The agency code “House Check” refers to a directed patrol of property at the request of the property owner.
SJPD Agency Calls for Service
VSP Calls for Service in St. J.
CALEX and Fire Department
The nature of the calls for service for EMS and the FD make it difficult to categorize and use for analysis. The most common call for service to the FD was “Medical/Lift Assist.” For CALEX, the most common call was “Patient Transfer”, followed by “Medical- Other” as the second most common.
SJPD Call Groupings
CRG grouped offenses for ease of analysis. This table shows the call types grouped for quality of life incidents.
Calls for Service with Groups
Daily SJPD
SJPD Top 10 Locations for Quality of Life Calls
VSP Top 10 Locations for Quality of Life Calls
Individuals Impacting Community Well-being
CRG identified the 20 individuals most closely linked to quality of life incidents and analyzed all associated events. Together, these 20 individuals accounted for 2,529 calls for service, representing 11% of the total 22,704 calls during the study period.
The figure below shows the daily interaction of the 20 people throughout the study period. Each dot represents a day that the person had police contact. Reducing the frequency of contacts, in terms of number of days and number of times per day, should be the goal of any collaborative efforts. Only two people appeared in both SJPD data and VSP data.
Number of Contacts per Day
The figure below shows the daily frequency of police contacts for individuals. Some people have multiple contacts during one day.
Types of Incidents
The table below shows the type of incidents (CRG’s grouping) in which these 20 people were involved. Quality of life events made up 55.43% of the call types and 14.63 % were assist type calls.
All Calls Involving the Top 20 People
Arrests
Five of the 20 people in the cohort were never arrested for an offense during the study period. One person who was not arrested during the study period was the person involved in the most calls.
Locations Where SJPD engaged with the Top 20
Recommendations
Focus on people who have multiple contacts with the police/EMS services per day or week.
PD should work on recording all calls appropriately, accurate addresses, call types that are useful.
Overdose clusters: organize a coordinated response when new-batch overdoses become apparent. Organize a coordinated response when large drug busts, new players etc. increase the likelihood of OD.
Build capacity for in house analysis.
Look at external data https://crgvt.shinyapps.io/bail/, https://crgvt.shinyapps.io/transitionalhousing/, https://crgvt.shinyapps.io/restorativejustice/