Nothing appeared amiss on the downtown Burlington street corner where Chittenden County Sheriff Dan Gamelin posted up one morning last week. Office workers trudged up an alley to an eight-story building at Bank and Pine streets. A few teens walked and biked toward the nearby Burlington High School.
During this humdrum commute, Gamelin sat in his unmarked black Chevy Tahoe and watched the block come to life.
That was fine by him. One of the businesses inside that tall office building, Goldman Sachs, was paying Gamelin to keep watch for four hours a day, Monday through Friday. Elsewhere in the city, his deputies would monitor other patches of property, chosen by whoever was willing to pay them. Gamelin and his deputies would keep an eye out for trespassers, maintain a visible presence or make arrests — whatever the customer wished.
Over the past year, Gamelin has transformed his department into a security service for hire, signing contracts with private businesses and the City of Burlington to provide security at specific locations. Most of the work is in the Queen City, where a spike in certain crimes, public drug use and homelessness has unsettled residents and frustrated merchants. The city’s malaise, coupled with a staff shortage at the Burlington Police Department, has driven demand for security services.
So, for the sheriff, business is booming. Gamelin’s department raked in more than $530,000 from security details during the first nine months of 2024 — more than the previous five years combined. His department now patrols grocery stores, vacant buildings, apartments, office complexes and a city parking garage.
Sheriff Dan Gamelin has transformed his department into a security service for hire, signing contracts to conduct long-term security details at specific locations.
The arrangements might seem inefficient in a city where victims of lower-level crimes complain that law enforcement isn’t available to respond. When Seven Days reported last year that off-duty Burlington police officers had taken side gigs providing security for a Riverside Avenue condo complex, elected officials cried foul.
But county sheriffs do not have the same responsibilities as municipal police departments. While they receive some tax dollars to pay the sheriff’s salary and transport prisoners to court hearings, they raise most of their revenue through contracted work — escorting wide loads on the highway, for instance, or patrolling a town part time.
Gamelin’s initiative is both a sign of the times and an innovation, said Lamoille County Sheriff Roger Marcoux Jr., who has earned a reputation as one of the state’s most enterprising sheriffs since he took office in 2001.
“This stuff where you go to local businesses to guard that — to me, that’s new,” Marcoux said.
Gamelin, who was elected in 2022, has a personal incentive to drum up business. State law allows sheriffs to keep up to 5 percent of revenue earned through contract work, at their discretion. With more than $500,000 in security detail revenue so far this year, Gamelin could take home more than $26,000. The sheriff said he hasn’t decided whether he will.
Goldman Sachs, the world’s second-largest investment bank, contracted with Gamelin in April to station a deputy outside the 100 Bank Street building where it keeps an under-the-radar office. Why? Gamelin heard someone pointed a gun at a private security guard who stumbled upon a drug deal in a stairwell.
Goldman Sachs wanted an officer posted there for 12 hours a day, Gamelin said, but the sheriff doesn’t have the deputies to do that. Instead, the contract calls for a uniformed deputy to guard the building each day for two hours in the mornings and evenings. Per the contract, which Seven Days obtained through a public records request, the sheriff’s responsibilities include “assisting staff to their vehicles at request” and “move on assailants from the building facade.”
Gamelin, who leads a department with 20 full-time and 10 part-time deputies, mans the post himself when no deputies are available.
Lately, the “assailants” have tended to be homeless people camping in nooks outside the building. Flattened cardboard boxes covered the concrete next to an emergency exit. An empty tent and blanket lay strewn in another alcove.
Gamelin said his patrols have reduced problems at the building. He finds fewer needles outside these days.
“They’re not coming here — at least, they know that in the morning, we get here,” he said.
For years, his department’s only steady security contract was to patrol the railroad property downtown to make sure no one slept inside or under the boxcars. Over the past year, Gamelin has added eight new contracts.
Last winter, Burlington Housing Authority hired his department to conduct overnight sweeps inside Decker Towers, though those patrols have since ended. Gamelin also signed security contracts with the Champlain Housing Trust, Ohavi Zedek synagogue and the Chittenden County Superior Court. Green Castle Group, which recently purchased the derelict former YMCA building on College Street, hired the sheriff’s department in August to patrol the grounds.
The sheriff charges $75 per hour for a security detail and $112.50 per hour for work after 5 p.m.
Gamelin’s largest contract, by far, is with an affiliate of Hannaford grocery stores. Chittenden County sheriff’s deputies are stationed at various supermarket locations in Chittenden and Franklin counties to combat theft for a combined 120 hours per week, Gamelin said. Some stand in uniform, while others work in plain clothes with the company’s loss-prevention employees, Gamelin said.
Unlike store employees and private security guards, the deputies can pursue suspected thieves into the parking lot. “Our guys have gotten into some physical fights with some of these people that are stealing,” Gamelin said.
They’ve also made shoplifting arrests — more than 400 apprehensions at the Hannaford locations. They issue citations for any theft over $100, Gamelin said, though the Chittenden County State’s Attorney Office has declined to prosecute many of the cases.
State’s Attorney Sarah George said her office scrutinizes whether charges merit the limited resources of a strapped judicial system.
“If someone is stopped at the door and the theft is avoided and there is no money owed to a large corporation,” George wrote in an email, “that is a successful deterrence of the crime and we will consider those factors when deciding if it’s worth adding another retail theft to our backlog of cases.”
Queen City taxpayers are funding Gamelin’s most recent contract. Burlington, which maintains the largest municipal police department in the state, turned to the sheriff’s department this fall to deal with mounting complaints around the Church Street Marketplace.
The city now pays the sheriff’s department $1,500 weekly to guard the city-owned Marketplace parking garage. The garage, used by shoppers and tourists, has become a hot spot for loitering and drug use, prompting officials to shutter two of its interior stairwells.
Since September 2, deputy Tom Oliver — who is also a state representative from Sheldon — has been stationed inside the garage on weekdays from 11:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. The city’s written contract discourages Oliver from making arrests or using force.
Oliver camped out near the alleyway that connects the garage to Church Street around lunchtime one day last week. He described his assignment as “just trying to keep it happy, safe.” Oliver has encountered some scuffles, drug use, public fornication and angry business owners. He tries to mediate disputes, Oliver said, but hasn’t made any arrests or issued any trespass notices.
“I appreciate you,” a woman told Oliver as she walked to her car, a box of new shoes in hand. “It’s nice to have a presence down here again.”
The woman, Morgan, said she was from Hyde Park but declined to give her last name. She’d come to Burlington to shop.
“I don’t like to be this way, but I’m a little bit intimidated, so I don’t come down nearly as often as I used to,” Morgan said. “Looking around today, I was like, Oh, OK, it feels a little better.”
Others are wary of Oliver’s presence. For more than four years, local mutual-aid organization Food Not Cops has distributed free hot lunches every day at 1 p.m. from a brick ledge on the ground floor. The lunch attracts 20 to 40 people daily, many of them poor or homeless. Some attendees have long rap sheets or active trespass notices from surrounding businesses.
Members of Food Not Cops believe the sheriff’s detail has kept some people away.
“As an organization called Food Not Cops, to have a cop sit right there is very tense and uncomfortable,” one organizer, Gwen Gosey, said.
Gosey and other lunch organizers suspect the city hired the sheriff at least in part because some businesspeople have been complaining about Food Not Cops. Frustrated by erratic behavior around Church Street, some businesses have come to see the lunch as a magnet for troublemakers.
“I think we should really examine what purpose it’s serving and whether it’s best located there,” Burlington Business Association executive director Kelly Devine said.
Mayor Emma Mulvaney-Stanak’s office, in a statement, denied that the city hired the sheriff in response to such complaints. Rather, spokesperson Joe Magee said, the city is combating unrelated “anti-social behavior” in the garage that Burlington police don’t have the resources to address. The city also pays private security firms to patrol the garage at night, Magee noted.
Magee acknowledged, however, that the mayor has talked to Food Not Cops leaders about “finding an alternative location for the distribution that is safer and more sanitary.”
So far, those conversations haven’t gone anywhere. Food Not Cops organizer Sam Bliss said the organization is safely providing an “essential service” with no public funding. “It’s frustrating that when the city wants to engage with us, it’s to put a sheriff next to us — to police us — or to ask us to move,” Bliss said.
As Beth Deering ate lunch at the distribution last Wednesday, she questioned the wisdom of the sheriff’s detail. Deering, who uses a wheelchair, said Oliver does little else but “babysit” her and the other homeless people who use the garage.
“They should be focused on things that only they can do, being a sheriff,” she said, “and let the security be done by the people that can only do security.”
The garage is less rowdy since he started patrolling, Oliver said, but he also admitted that his post has a limited impact.
“It’s displacement,” he said. “They’re going to go somewhere else, and probably get moved along at some point from there.”
That is, if the next property owner can afford it.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Rent a Cop | Business is booming for Chittenden County’s sheriff amid a spike in nuisance crimes and homelessness”
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This article appears in Nov 6-12, 2024.
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