A few weeks ago, Springfield Police Chief Jeffrey Burnham found himself out of his element. The line of duty had led him to an assignment that fell squarely outside his law enforcement training: hanging sheet rock.
“I’m not very good at it,” Burnham admitted, “but people who are good at it fixed my mistakes.”
Burnham was helping rehab an apartment so that a family on the cusp of eviction could move in. The assignment came from a new group of local social service agencies and law enforcement officials that meet weekly at the Springfield Police Department.
We don’t fix the problems … but we try to lower the potential badness of what’s going on.Springfield Police Chief Jeffrey Burnham
The assembled organizations, which include housing agencies, addiction treatment organizations and police, use a model called a “situation table” to coordinate responses to people who might be in need of multiple social services — whether it’s housing support and substance use treatment, or mental health treatment and help finding a job.
“We don’t fix the problems … but we try to lower the potential badness of what’s going on,” Burnham said.
In the case of the housing rehab, the group was presented with a pressing problem: A single parent and their five kids were going to be evicted from their apartment. A local housing agency had found a landlord who would take the family’s housing voucher, but the apartment was uninhabitable — and the landlord wasn’t going to be able to fix it up in time.
So, the group hatched a plan: They’d renovate the place themselves.
The team managed to find volunteers to paint, clean and repair the apartment over the course of two weeks. The family was able to move in before their housing voucher expired.
“So fixing their living situation, I believe, got ahead of potential problems with truancy, health, safety, mental health and all the things that go with it when you're struggling just for the bare basics,” Burnham said.
Springfield, like many other municipalities in Vermont, has struggled to address a growing number of people who suffer from housing instability, mental illness and substance use disorders. Law enforcement officials say police are often called on to handle incidents that involve a mixture of these social problems, despite not being the people best positioned to offer supportive services.
The situation table model that Springfield has adopted aims to better coordinate community responses to the frequently overlapping issues, like drug use and homelessness, that can lead to crime. The goal is to direct people to social supports and organizations rather than using police as the catch-all agency for these problems.
“If people are getting their basic needs met — housing, food, shelter — they don't need to go trespass somewhere, they don't need to steal stuff to eat,” Burnham said.
Springfield isn’t the only Vermont town to adopt this approach. Over the past year, the state has funded situation table trainings for eight municipalities.
“When you think about how to get help to our most vulnerable, it really does compel us to share information and lift people up and wrap services around them in a holistic way, rather than doing things in a silo,” said Jennifer Morrison, commissioner of the Department of Public Safety. “It struck us as very Vermont-y.”
Anyone at the meeting can bring a “situation” to the group, first giving a high-level summary without any identifying information about the person.
If the team decides they need to intervene, they create a smaller group to form a plan. For someone struggling with drug use, mental health issues and petty theft, for example, that group could include a police officer, someone working in addiction treatment and a member of a mental health agency.
One of the first tasks of that smaller group is to secure the individual’s consent to share medical or other private information, Burnham said.
Once the group has an intervention plan, it reports back on its progress to the full group the following week.
In Springfield, the model has been used to tackle about 50 cases since members started meeting in January.
In one case, the team sourced a dumpster to assist a person who struggled with hoarding. They bought pizza to feed volunteers and cleared out the house, which was so full of garbage they initially had to climb through a window to get in, Burnham said.
In another instance, the team was concerned that a person coming out of rehab, who didn't have a social support network and unstable housing, would relapse. So, they decided to throw a “support” party for him when he got back to Springfield.
“To say the person was overwhelmed was an understatement,” Burnham said. “He appreciated … the fact that the police were there in a supportive role, instead of a holding-him-accountable role.”
That person, despite encountering some bumps along the road, is doing well, said Jennifer Pierson, a recovery coach at Turning Point Recovery Center of Springfield who’s embedded with the police department.
Pierson, who’s in long-term recovery, said a program like the situation table would have helped her while she was in active addiction.
“I know how hard it is to reach my arm out and ask for help,” Pierson said. “Where this [the situation table] is people coming to me.”
The model is now up and running in Brattleboro, Bennington, Rutland, St. Johnsbury, Barre, Burlington and several Upper Valley towns. According to Morrison, the state repurposed a federal grant and spent $25,000 per community. For now, it doesn’t have funding for any additional towns, but Morrison said that’s something the department is looking into.
Developed in 2011 in Saskatchewan, Canada, the model spread throughout the country. A preliminary assessment in 2014 found clients were getting quicker access to support services and in some cases getting access to services they had never reached before, according to Canada’s public safety department.
Forty-five communities across the United States are now using situation tables, said Scott Allen, executive director of community engagement at Cordata.
Long term, what we’re seeing in some of these communities now, when they build up more data, is calls for service start to decline. I saw it in my own community — criminal offenses start to decline.Scott Allen, executive director of community engagement at Cordata
Allen became an evangelist for situation tables after using them in East Bridgewater, Massachusetts, where he was police chief for nearly four years. After Allen retired in 2020, he and another retired Massachusetts police chief started a company to teach the process to other towns.
“Long term, what we’re seeing in some of these communities now, when they build up more data, is calls for service start to decline,” Allen said in a recent interview. “I saw it in my own community — criminal offenses start to decline.”
While the situation table model is new to Vermont, the general concept — bringing social services agencies and law enforcement together to tackle problems — has been tried before.
Rutland’s Project VISION launched more than a decade ago, and in 2016 former Burlington Police Chief Brandon del Pozo started CommunityStat — both initiatives that regularly brought community organizations and police together.
Jim Baker, the former Rutland police chief who helped start Project VISION, thinks it’s worth trying something new.
“In Project VISION’s situation, after a period of time people change, people leave positions [and] the energy can evaporate,” Baker said in a recent interview.
Baker, who now runs a consulting business, identified the situation table model as a tool to bring to Vermont towns while he was working for the Department of Public Safety. But it’s too soon to say if situation tables will have staying power, Baker said.
“The thing that encourages me is that this training wasn't brought to one community,” Baker said. “So the chances are that it's going to germinate and take off because it's just not one community doing it.”
Burlington started using the situation table model in July amid increasing calls for city leaders to address rising levels of unsheltered homelessness, public drug use and mental health issues.
One really vexing common thread through a lot of these folks is they're unhoused. And there's not easy answers in that space.Interim Burlington Police Chief Shawn Burke
As of last week, the situation table in the Queen City had tackled 16 cases. In 10 incidents the person was connected to services, four were closed with “less positive” results, and two were still active, said interim Police Chief Shawn Burke.
The model has been particularly effective at addressing short-term acute issues, according to Burke. But he says it’s just one tool, and the city will need additional strategies.
“One really vexing common thread through a lot of these folks is they're unhoused,” Burke said. “And there's not easy answers in that space.”
In Springfield, those around the situation table say they’re pleased with the results so far. Zach Labelle, with Turning Point Recovery Center of Springfield, said the organizations each week pool all their resources to get people’s basic needs met.
“It’s pretty amazing to watch everything work,” he said.
