Police Force Tries to Diversify Ranks

As a boy in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Amir Lulic hid when he saw a police car. Law enforcement represented repression in his home country, and a police presence invoked fear -- not a sense of safety. But here in Burlington, Lulic has become an apostle for the Police Department in a rapidly changing community.

An influx of immigrants from Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and Lulic’s native Balkan region is transforming Vermont’s largest city. To adapt, Burlington’s police force has launched an aggressive diversification campaign. Community consultants such as Lulic -- who venture into the city’s ethnic enclaves to recruit potential officers -- are a key piece in the hiring strategy

“I’m working with the Burlington police,” Lulic explained one recent day as he stopped by the Thai Phat Oriental Food Market. “We’re looking for more Asian people to go into police work.”

Andy Thai, the store’s owner, looked up from the shelf he was stocking with cans of exotic fruits. Thai, 34, said that when he arrived in Burlington 13 years ago, he “almost never saw any Asian people.” But the 2000 census showed about 1,000 Asians living in this city of 40,000 -- many from Thai’s homeland, Vietnam.

“It would be a good thing to have some Vietnamese police officers,” he said. “It would help the community a lot, with language, with translation. It would make people feel safer.”

Burlington Police Chief Tom Tremblay admits that his 95-member force still mirrors the old demographics of a state that according to the latest census was 96.8% white -- second only to Maine.

Burlington has just one African American police officer, a detective who joined the department in 1993. A Vietnamese woman works as a full-time civilian consultant on domestic violence cases. And two Latino officers have been hired in the last two years.

But after the department aired a 30-second television ad in March and April, 35 men and women submitted applications -- a veritable avalanche by Burlington standards. Deputy Chief Stephen Whark said the inquiries came from many parts of the country, and that many were from minorities. The ad, funded by a grant from the U.S. Department of Justice, ran only in New England.

The prospective officers face a daunting screening process. Along with rigorous physical requirements, applicants must take psychological and polygraph tests, as well as a written exam. Burlington, which requires its police officers to have college degrees, is offering a starting salary of $32,800.

“We are competing [for employees] with a technology market that works Monday through Friday,” Tremblay said. “And you don’t have to put on a bullet-proof vest when you go to work.”

So Burlington is trying to counter the arguments against becoming an officer by marketing itself as one of the country’s most livable small cities -- a distinction awarded to this college community alongside Lake Champlain in numerous surveys.

Crime is low. Most incidents involve breaking-and-entering or larceny, although domestic violence and illegal drug trafficking are ongoing concerns. On average, Burlington records two to three homicides per year.

“But some years, we don’t have any,” Tremblay said.

Although Burlington is 92% white, the city’s population began shifting about 15 years ago when it became an official refugee resettlement area for Vietnamese immigrants. Bosnians arrived after the war in the Balkans. A cluster of Somali immigrants also established homes in Burlington. Refugees from Sudan also have joined the mix, too recently to have been counted in the census.

As “we saw our population changing in our own backyard,” Whark said, the Burlington Police Department won a $200,000 “Hiring in the Spirit of Service” grant from the Justice Department’s community policing consortium. Similar awards aimed at increasing minority hiring went to police forces in Tampa, Fla., Sacramento, Detroit and the Sheriff’s Department in King County, Wash.

The Burlington force enlisted a retired professor, Jim Borow, to coordinate its hiring campaign. Borow helped write the TV ad, and drafted Lulic and three other “adjunct recruiters” to act as $25-per-hour liaisons between the police and the city’s immigrant communities.

Lulic, a 28-year-old senior at Champlain College, arrived here 8 1/2 years ago from Banja Luka, Bosnia’s second-largest city. He said there were several thousand Bosnians living in Burlington and surrounding towns in Chittenden County.

To drum up support for police work, Lulic and his fellow recruiters set up booths at street fairs, attend town meetings and distribute brochures and applications at schools and workplaces. Not long ago, Lulic went to his mosque, where the imam agreed to keep his eye out for young men and women who might be interested in police work.

Mostly, Lulic said, his 10-hour-per-week job centers on “telling the community that these are not the bad guys. You have to remember, many of us who are immigrants come from places where the police are not there to protect us.”

Making the rounds of Burlington’s Old North End, a neighborhood that is home to many of the newcomers, Lulic paid a visit recently to the Global Market, a cafe and grocery store that caters to Bosnian immigrants.

“This is so important,” said Lila Murray, who owns the market with her husband, Waell. “When you are dealing with different cultures, there is just so much going on. And this is definitely an uphill battle, because you are dealing with the idea of a policeman versus the reality of what a policeman does.”

Lulic purchased a package of his favorite Bosnian chocolates -- wrapped in pictures of jungle creatures, to appeal to young children. “Definitely,” he agreed, “there is a lot of need for encouragement. We are telling people that this work is not as hard as it looks -- but not as easy as it looks, either.”