They Ruined My Hometown – Don’t Let This Happen to Yours (Burlington, VT)

(bright music)
– Good morning, guys,
beautiful Lake Champlain
in downtown Burlington, Vermont,
a small city of roughly 45,000 people,
but the biggest city in the state
that has undergone quite a
few changes in recent years.
And this one hits a bit close to home
because I was born here
and I grew up 45 minutes
south of the city,
and I have great memories of this place.
And from my understanding,
it’s not really like what it was downtown.
So let’s go down there,
get a better understanding
of what’s going on.
Let’s do this.
(relaxed music)
Growing up here,
if you wanted any urban environment
in the state, basically, it was here.
And now for anyone from a big city,
you’re like, okay, that’s a small town.
But, yeah, it’s all perspective.
It was always the place of social activity
and excitement and concerts and events.
And here’s the bike shop
I worked at, the Skirack,
and the owner Spike brought
me in under his wing
and got me into bike racing,
and that’s really what got me
out of Vermont at a young age.
I saw all of these other
places and my world expanded,
but it was all because of Spike.
Well, and my mom too and others,
but Spike had a big role in my life.
He’s since passed, but we
had a huge bike race up here,
I think it still goes on, Burlington Crit.
(bells ringing)
Church Street, all Vermonters
know of this street.
This is the place for shopping
and being around people and
a nice pedestrian street.
Great memories here,
walking down this street
with my mom in the winter
and the snow falling and
the lights and the activity.
So we’re just gonna get into it.
First impressions, doesn’t look so bad,
but looks can be deceiving.
And what is it like a
layer or two layers deeper?
A tourist like me
wouldn’t understand that,
but a local or business owner would.
Posh Nails,
Lululemon, here’s a
security guard in here.
How you guys doing?
All right, camera is not on you.
– [Security] Okay.
– All right. I’m here with security,
but he’s gotta ask first if
it’s okay to be on camera,
he’s making the call.
Recording this way so you’re
not on the camera, sir.
So the the authorities said
you can’t speak on camera as security.
– [Security] Correct.
– Okay, but we found a
very interesting woman here
that’s a local.
– I’m a local.
– And he vouched for you.
– Well, that’s good,
I’m glad somebody vouched for me. (laughs)
– [Peter] Okay, so the only thing is
I don’t have time to get my microphone
’cause you said you got low time.
– I do, I got a kid going to college.
– [Peter] Okay, so you’re
just gonna have to speak loud.
– Yeah, okay.
I’m from Vermont, I am from
Central Vermont originally,
but I’ve spent a lot
of time in Burlington.
– [Peter] Okay.
– Vermont’s my home, I know
these streets in and out.
– [Peter] Okay, so what are you seeing
that we’re not seeing here right now?
– Well, I have to say, college.
So UVM started yesterday.
– Okay.
– There’s a cleanup that happened.
– Oh, seriously?
– Oh yeah.
– I hit it at the wrong time?
– You hit at the wrong time.
– Oh man.
– If you were here
two days ago, even yesterday morning.
– Come on.
– I’m not kidding.
– Come on.
– I’m not kidding.
– So North Korea style, clean it up.
– Clean it up.
– Dignitaries coming in.
– They do it every time.
And of course, this could
be just total conspiracy,
but we all know it.
– Okay, when Xi comes to
San Francisco, same story.
– Same story.
– Okay.
– And like 4th of July.
– Yeah.
– All the big, you know, the eclipse,
when the eclipse happened?
– Okay.
– Where did everyone go?
They all of a sudden, people disappeared.
– So on a normal day.
– On a normal day.
– What’s going on here
one level below what the tourist sees?
Like, robberies, crime,
what’s happening?
– You’ll see people
totally methed out.
– Okay.
– Tranqued.
– You have tranq here?
– Oh God, yeah.
– Oh, that’s nice.
– Oh yeah, I’ll take you over to an area
where we’ll see wounds, oh yeah.
– We can go over, okay,
so I was just in Kensington, PA.
– Yeah, oh yeah.
– In Philly.
– Tranq central, it’s gross.
– Oh yeah.
– No, there’s a street called Buell,
I call it Little Kensington.
– [Peter] Okay, is Burlington
managed in the sense
that they’re gonna let that
just fly on the streets?
– Oh yeah.
– It’s not an open drug market though.
– Here, there’s drug dealer right here.
– Where?
– Right there, that truck.
– In the blue, how do you know?
– [Asah] I just know, I work independently
with Burlington Police.
Those kids, drug dealers right there.
– [Peter] Those two?
– Yep, they’re runners, the
way they carry their bags
and we see them certain
areas, certain houses,
the way they move, the way they walk,
who they interact with.
These are kids that are from, you know,
for lack of a better word,
the ghetto of Burlington.
Certain neighborhoods see that now,
the drug dealer’s coming,
you know, they’re promised by
these out-of-state dealers,
you know, bigger things,
shoes, nice clothes, phones.
– [Peter] Okay.
– And they’re making more than
they can make at Subway or McDonald’s.
– [Peter] Yep.
– And they’re young enough
that if they do get busted,
they’re not going-
– [Peter] Okay, what’s this going?
They’re picking this lady up.
– Yep, let’s see, yep, so they probably-
– [Peter] Let’s go over here.
– Just shoplifted something
or they got off the bus
with shoplifted stuff
and that’s probably Christina Yandow.
– [Peter] Christina Yandow,
I think I went to high school with her.
– Yeah, oh, look, she’s out of her mind.
– [Peter] Yeah, on
something, on something.
– So she just got addicted.
– This guy behind us with
the fist who came up on us.
– Yeah.
– What was that?
– I think he was threatening us.
– Yeah, it was like,
“Get off that corner.”
– [Asah] Yeah.
– [Peter] It’s like when you
say look for a red Volkswagen,
you start seeing ’em.
– Yeah.
– [Peter] If you’re
like, don’t look for it,
you sort of don’t notice,
but just in that little corner
there, you could feel it.
– No, you know.
– Where are the cops? I
haven’t seen one policeman.
– There’s nobody.
– Why?
– So manpower,
there’s not enough of ’em.
I literally, before I was just here,
I was just down at the police
station with a stolen bike,
a reported stolen bike from a UVM student,
and it was abandoned at the library.
They didn’t have enough
police to come and get it.
I grabbed it, walked it
down to the police station.
Literally, dispatch told me
they didn’t have enough people
to meet me at the back door.
– Okay.
– (laughs) I’m like,
and I literally said,
“Are you kidding me?”
– Right.
– I said, “That is frightening,
you don’t have enough
people to open the back door
to take in stolen property,
reported stolen property.”
But, hold on a second, like-
– So, okay.
– So this is another
area, we’re on a street.
– Okay, before we get
off that topic, 2020,
I was living in Ukraine.
– Yep.
– My mom lives in Vermont still.
– Yep.
– So I came back and saw
the whole Defund the Police situation here
and what was going on there, right?
And so, I thought, okay,
it will be somewhat
corrected four years later.
What are you saying, it’s not there yet?
– So there are, last count,
I think like around 22 uniformed officers.
Anywhere, 22, 24 uniformed officers.
– [Peter] Yeah, 45,000 residents roughly.
– Right, so seven days
a week, 24 hours a day.
– Okay, and then, from the sounds of it,
incentivization to commit the crime,
because the punishments are easier here,
or what’s the story?
– Yeah, I mean, we have a lot
of catch and release stuff.
– Okay.
– I will say the state’s attorney
is doing more than she has.
– Sarah George.
– Sarah George.
– I researched her.
– Yes.
– So she’s part of a group,
I’m forgetting the name of it.
– The Soros, George Soros.
– It’s funded by Soros,
from my understanding,
and I have to deep dive
to make sure of that.
But who’s in there?
Chesa Boudin, the former
DA of San Francisco.
– Right.
– Where I lived,
when I came back to the States,
went back to San Francisco.
– Yep.
– It got so bad under those
policies, my wife and I left.
He got recalled, San
Francisco recalled it.
– Yeah.
– Because it was the whole
criminals are the victim’s narrative,
and the crime was through the roof
and quality of life sucked.
So, as in, someone can set up a tent here,
you can’t really do anything about it,
smash and grabs everywhere, no punishment.
The theft went up to 950,
you could steal up to 950 anywhere,
nothing’s gonna happen.
– Right.
– That’s a misdemeanor.
So the prosecutor, the DA,
wasn’t prosecuting those misdemeanors.
So the cops gave up.
– Vermont, yeah.
– They just gave up.
– Vermont recently,
we recently changed that law.
– Oh, cool.
– Yeah, as a state.
– Okay.
– So that’s changed.
And Sarah’s working with-
– [Peter] She is.
– She is, I mean, literally, this morning,
I was emailing with
her about an individual
that was in violation of
his conditions of release.
And I took a picture of him
and literally with my camera,
I was able to measure
that he was in violation.
(alarm blaring)
There’s an alarm going off
somewhere, a violation,
it was, he’s supposed to be
300 feet from a certain place
and he was 24 feet.
And I emailed her and she said,
“All right, I’ll take note of this,
but please call the police to report it,”
which I did.
– [Peter] Okay.
– He was also harassing people.
So there’s this misconception
that she wouldn’t do that,
Burlington Police keep calling me.
– [Peter] They’re calling you?
– Yeah.
– Okay,
so you’re on the beat
here, you know everyone.
– Yeah.
– Okay, that’s interesting, okay.
– I know everyone, like, I literally know.
Oh, the guy over there by the,
we better be careful right now.
– [Peter] By the Simon’s Downtown Quick.
– Yeah.
– Quick Mart?
– Yeah.
We gotta be careful with that guy.
In the garage,
people will go and exchange
stolen goods or cash
if they have it for drugs.
– [Peter] Seriously?
– Seriously,
in the garage.
– In the city parking garage.
– [Asah] In the city parking garage.
– [Peter] But the city’s
gotta know about this.
– Oh yeah, the city knows about it,
there’s cameras in there,
the police will go in there.
– So they let it fly?
– It’s an open air drug market in there.
– [Peter] Can we go?
– If you want to, I mean, sure.
– Or do you want me to go alone?
– No, we can go in.
– You sure you wanna go?
– I don’t care.
– All right.
– [Worker] Peter?
– [Peter] Yes, nice to meet you, ma’am.
– [Worker] You’re not filming me, are you?
– [Peter] I am, you want me to not?
– [Asah] She’s not allowed to.
– Okay, can I film myself?
All right, so you’re a city worker?
– No, no.
– Can’t say, right,
and I totally respect that,
I won’t put the camera on you and nothing.
That’s the problem, Asah, right now.
– [Asah] I gotta answer this.
– The security guy.
– This is the third time
the Burlington Police have called me.
Yeah.
– Okay, thank you, ma’am, I appreciate it.
I understand you can’t
speak or be shown, but.
– Lifting up cops people,
they every day feed people,
and honestly, most of ’em are criminals.
I just actually was talking
to the sergeant at BPD.
Unfortunately, everyone is out
at an incident from this morning.
– [Peter] What happened this morning?
– I can’t say, no.
– Can’t tell, okay.
Something not so good though.
– Yeah, he appreciated the notification
and he will send someone
to do a drive through ASAP.
– [Peter] Watch out, ladies,
there’s a bit of a drug scene over there.
If you stay to the left,
I think you’re fine.
– People were fighting when we came down.
– They were fighting?
– Each other.
– [Asah] I don’t know if
you have anyone available.
– All right.
– Oh well.
– [Peter] In these moments,
you sort of breeze through, right?
– Yeah, yeah, you just kind of go through.
– [Peter] And so, I remember being a child
coming in here with my mom.
– [Asah] Oh yeah.
– [Peter] Going shopping on Church Street.
– Yeah, coming in here.
– [Peter] Coming in here, and
now we have trash back there
and so this is a drug situation.
– [Asah] Yeah, totally.
– And what is the drug
of choice right now?
– Meth, phet.
– [Peter] Okay.
And then, you got people
paying for their tickets.
– [Asah] Paying for their tickets.
– [Peter] And some are
aware of the situation,
others aren’t.
– Oh yeah.
Yeah, and we have one,
the city closed all the staircases but one
’cause of the situation in the staircases.
People were using in the staircases,
prostitution in the staircases.
I walked in on a situation where a woman,
I’m gonna be very crass.
– Uh-huh.
– A woman, it basically was a train.
– Oh, nice.
– Yeah.
– Train, what does that mean?
– So men were lined up to-
– In there?
– Yeah, yep.
– Oh my God.
So those guys, what kind of drugs
do you think they’re doing?
– Oh, they’re smoking meth.
– They’re smoking meth?
– Yeah.
– In the church lawn?
– In the church lawn.
– Openly?
– [Asah] Openly, yeah, openly,
and nothing will happen.
– [Peter] And that flies here, these-
– It totally flies.
– That flies these days?
– It flies.
– [Peter] How is that possible?
– I don’t know,
and we’re supposed to be
getting a safe injection site.
– Oh, don’t do that.
– I know.
– Oh my God.
You’re gonna bring everyone here
who wants to inject without issues.
– Well, and one of the
things that I have always,
I’m like, all right,
so we’re gonna have a safe injection site,
then we need to say, “No open air usage,”
and if you open air use,
there needs to be consequences to it.
– [Peter] Oh yeah, so the
churches are okay with this or?
– No, they’re not, the churches
are not okay with this.
This church has had
so much damage done to
it in the past year.
Like, that stairwell there,
last summer, had all the rocks,
somebody like chiseled underneath
and like built an encampment
under the stairs there.
Their downspout, copper
downspout, was stolen last year.
It was like $50,000
worth of copper stolen.
– [Peter] Okay, is the
church still in service?
– Oh yeah, yep.
And it’s unfortunate
too, because this church,
this is where people that are
in recovery come for meetings.
And when you have people out here using,
you don’t want to be going to meetings
for recovery with people opening using.
– So does the city provide
mental health services?
– To a degree.
We have Howard Center.
But again, it’s one of those
things where it’s manpower,
it’s not a glamorous job,
it’s not a high paying job.
– Right.
– And when housing prices
are through the roof.
– Yeah.
– Where are you gonna live?
– Right.
– So we’re limited on that.
After Hurricane Irene,
the state closed down
the mental health facility in Waterbury
and that was incredibly
detrimental to the state.
And where did all those people go?
Most of them are probably on the street.
– Well, here’s how it works,
they’re gonna go where
it’s the best for them.
– Which is Burlington.
– So if there are more services
and more to have.
– Right.
– And you can get away with
doing drugs on the streets,
that’s where you’re gonna go.
– And they’re self-medicating.
– Yeah, that’s the problem.
– And we see it all the time.
– So this video,
we’re not going into the deep,
like, what it really takes
to change this thing.
– Yeah, no, no, no,
no, I know.
– ‘Cause it’s very deep,
but just showing the problem.
– Yeah.
– I’ve been on Skid Row,
I’ve done videos with people
there that live there.
A lot of it is, for example, Los Angeles,
the housing’s there.
– Yeah.
– But you have to play by the rules,
you can’t be on drugs.
– Yeah.
– Yeah, there’s a curfew,
that sort of thing.
– And that’s the same.
– And a lot of people in
this world want the freedom.
– Yes.
– And the wildness.
– Yep.
– And if you’re in the drugs,
how do you have the wherewithal to say,
“Hey, you know what?
I need off the drugs.”
– Right.
– It doesn’t come that easily
for a lot of of people.
– No, it really.
– And most people, the reason
they’re doing that stuff
is ’cause there are deep
issues below it all, right?
They’re covering up.
– Yep.
I follow the, so Vermont courts have
this diversion to jail.
You have to drug test,
you go to drug counseling,
and it’s this whole process, right?
And if you don’t follow the program,
you get kicked out and go to
jail, and I follow those cases.
– Okay, what’s happening?
– The judge that does it is amazing.
But it’s so cool when I see people
that were three, four
years ago, hard into drugs,
and young, these are young kids,
like, not much older
than my oldest, right?
– Okay.
– And they were probably close to death.
They are clean and
sober, have an apartment,
got custody back of their child.
– Uh-huh.
– And are making it.
– Cool.
– It’s so, so cool.
– Right.
– But then there’s people
that aren’t ready yet
and they’re flopping, but
there’s accountability.
– You need accountability in the mix.
If the accountability’s
not there, it doesn’t work.
– And this is what this judge does.
You tested positive or you
didn’t show up to X amount of,
you know, appointments, you
go to jail for one night
or you have to do six
hours in the jury box,
or you have to go and work at the cemetery
picking up trash for two days,
like, there’s accountability.
– Yeah, you have to have
some skin in the game.
– Yes.
– Just getting free stuff does not work.
– No, it doesn’t.
– It doesn’t work anywhere.
It’s been tried.
– No.
– And then the industries
that build up around this,
so San Francisco, for example,
there’s no shortage of money,
we call it the Homeless Industrial Complex
because there are a lot of
people making money off it.
And if it all goes away, well,
that job’s not there anymore.
– Right.
– I moved out three years ago
because of quality of life issues.
I moved out of paradise,
my favorite place.
And then, when I come back to
where I was born and grew up
and see this like, I feel like Marty McFly
from “Back to the Future”, like,
“Hey guys, X, Y, and Z,
don’t do these things.”
– Yeah.
– And yeah, it’s a smaller city,
it doesn’t have the
problems of a big city,
but you sort of see a lot of-
– But we do.
– Common ground here, you do.
– We do.
Per capita, crime wise, we do.
– [Peter] Crime’s that bad here?
– Per capita, we are on point
with Chicago and Detroit.
– Come on.
– I’m not kidding.
– Come on.
– I’m not kidding.
– Well, as far as what,
property or?
– As property crimes.
– Not homicides.
– Not homicide, but
property crime, we are,
per capita with Chicago.
– Yeah, and look,
what is this?
– This is disgusting.
– Come on.
– [Asah] We should have pride.
And the fact that the
city, the city, really,
I mean, what is this?
– [Peter] This is garbage.
– [Asah] This is disgusting.
– [Peter] This doesn’t even fly in Ukraine
where I lived for four years.
– No, this is disgusting.
– So there’s no pride.
– There’s no, no.
– I mean, look at this,
you sort of see this.
– [Asah] Yeah.
– That’s what you mean,
quality of life stuff.
– You know, and I wanna
reach out to the judge
and bring that up as,
like, some of the stuff
that they need to make people do
is come out here and make them
clean up this kind of stuff.
– Right, if you’re gonna get free stuff.
– Right.
– X amount of hours
cleaning up.
– If you’re getting out,
cleaning up the streets that
you’ve, you know, defouled.
– And look at all the
graffiti you have now, like,
on that building over there.
– You know,
and no one really wants to
talk about it, we have gangs.
– Why are so many people
so scared to speak up?
So the man that reached out to me
where I got in contact with,
really wanted to tell this
story, can’t do it on camera.
– Right.
– Security, can’t do it on camera.
I guess, from his boss,
business owner, I stopped him,
can’t do it on camera.
– I think it’s a combination.
– Why are they so scared?
– It’s like the fear of
the whole being socially canceled,
I think that there’s still this fear
of it being associated with racism,
social economic, whatever.
– Yeah, those words
have lost their meaning.
– No, and they do.
– Because they’ve just been
slammed at everyone
for so long.
– And it’s not.
– The worst thing you can
call someone is a racist,
right?
– Right.
– And so, when someone
gets it the first time,
it just like weakens them
and they don’t realize who’s calling it,
you know, there are racists,
those should be called racists.
But just to be called racist
for talking about crime
in your city is insanity,
and most logically
minded people know that.
– Right, right, or targeting.
– People have to get over
that fear, like, what locals want this?
You know what I mean?
– [Asah] Yeah.
– [Peter] If they know what it was before.
– Right.
Or who wants to go to the
public library and see this,
this is our public library.
– All right.
– We should be proud of it.
– [Peter] Let’s check
it out, are you okay?
– [Asah] Oh yeah, this is a scene.
– [Peter] So what is
that? What drug of choice?
– [Addict] Hey, don’t make
yourselves look stupid.
People are staring at you,
they got the camera on too.
– Okay, right next to
the beautiful library.
– Right next to the beautiful library.
So their drug of choice
is heroin, sometimes,
and meth and crack, crack cocaine.
Anthony, he likes crack.
– So think of that,
you’re this mother here
bringing your young daughter.
– These kids, yeah.
– Yeah,
your son and your daughter.
– There’s no way I would let
my kids sit on that bench, ever.
– [Peter] Why? Because pee or something?
– Pee, feces, fentanyl.
– So this is allowed
these days in Burlington.
– This is allowed,
this is allowed.
– This situation.
– [Asah] This is allowed.
– [Peter] Little campground set up, drugs.
– You’ve got Saunders there.
– Wow.
– [Asah] Steven Saunders,
who’s hunched over.
Oh, you just saw a drug deal right there.
– [Peter] The drug deal?
– Yep, you literally just saw one.
They just don’t care, they don’t care.
– So what a lot of people don’t realize,
because in America,
things have been comfortable for so long.
– Yeah.
– And now they’re deteriorating
like this in some places.
– And fast.
– And fast, but policies equal realities,
like, that is only happening
because it’s allowed.
– It’s allowed.
– And so,
in other parts of the
country that might be allowed
or it might not be allowed.
– But this isn’t allowed,
that’s the thing.
– The law’s not enforced.
– It’s not enforced, but then
the ACLU will come in and sue,
and everyone’s afraid of the ACLU.
– So the ACLU thinks this is freedom,
even though it’s inhibiting
everyone else’s freedom.
– They’re being targeted
because they’re poor
or it’s this whole…
– You know what’s interesting?
A lot of the people that have these,
I call ’em luxury beliefs.
– Yeah.
– Don’t have to deal
with the kinetic reality.
They’re living, you go just south of here,
it’s really nice, really soon, right?
– Yeah.
– So you can live there in
safety, not dealing with that
and talk all day long and
it doesn’t affect you.
– Right.
– When BLM happened
here, I came back 2020,
more BLM signs here in this state,
and I’m all over the
country, than anywhere else.
I went to the hoods, way
less support for BLM, why?
Because they didn’t see
any of the money from BLM.
They knew the movement was a grift.
– Oh yeah.
– Right?
– But then you can sit in
the suburbs or in the country
and champion it all day long.
– Right.
– And it feels good,
maybe, it might feel good,
but below, who’s getting the money?
– Right.
– Who are the co-founders?
What are their beliefs?
– Right.
– Oh, one of their demands
is defund the police.
Okay, indirectly,
you’re supporting that
with your sign, right?
– Right.
– And it was so savvy that
who doesn’t think Black Lives Matter?
Of course, right?
– Right, right.
– But it’s a group that has a lot of money
and so they managed to take our goodness,
like, our compassion and use
it as a divisive movement.
And now, I’ve seen it,
I mean, that movement,
that summer really, really
broke down a lot of places.
– It really did, and then you throw in
what it did inside,
internally, to a department.
– He’s got gang flags on him.
– [Peter] Gang flags? What
the white and the yellow?
– [Asah] Yep, it’s not good.
– [Peter] So you have the equivalent
of the Bloods and the Crips here?
– [Asah] Yeah, we do, and Latin Kings.
– Latin Kings.
– Yep.
– [Peter] Well, that’s nice.
– These guys, you know, they play music,
all the drug dealers have
different music playing.
It’s like, hello, can you
advertise a little bit more?
And the female that’s
with him, she’s a pimp.
– [Peter] She’s pimping out here?
– Yeah, she’s pimping
out here, young girls.
– I’ve never seen female pimps.
– Yeah, she is and she’s
nasty and her mom deals drugs.
– Is that an only in
Vermont thing, female pimps?
– No.
– When I did a story on that in Las Vegas,
it was pretty clear, I mean,
it’s a very distinct group,
you would never see a female pimp there.
– No.
– That’s interesting.
– Yeah, she is…
– Something special.
– She’s something special, all right.
– Okay, but the compassionate
side comes out and says
her childhood probably sucked,
her life sucks, it’s terrible.
– Yeah, oh yeah, no, I mean, I’m sure.
– And so, find that person help.
And if they don’t want help,
at least get ’em out of this environment.
I don’t know how you do it, right?
But you will get to the point
if you have year after year,
if this compiles more,
that all of the life, all of
these businesses will say,
“You know what? It’s just not worth it.”
– [Asah] No.
– [Peter] They bounce, the
commercial real estate owners
say enough.
– Enough.
– Or they’re just not making their money
and you kill what’s really
cool about this city.
Okay, where else do we got?
– You have parents that are at UVM
that just start dropping their kids off,
literally saying, whoa.
– Oh really?
– Oh, yeah, literally saying
what happened this year?
I’m not kidding.
– [Peter] What’s the
tuition at UVM outta state?
– It’s gotta be 60.
– [Peter] Come on.
– Yeah.
– That much, okay.
So you’re spending a fortune,
you don’t know for sure though,
it could be 40 or 60.
– No, yeah,
it’s a lot.
– It’s a lot.
– Okay, so you’re spending a fortune,
you drop your young son or daughter here
and you’re seeing what you just told us.
– Yeah.
– And you’re like, oh.
– Yeah, you come down to have dinner,
I mean, literally, on the
UVM parents’ Facebook thread
talking about having dinner
after dropping their kids off at school
about how they just saw a
drug deal on Church Street,
and is it okay to drop their kid off
and get on a plane and fly to
the other side of the country?
– [Peter] Okay, is that
a BLM flag three down?
– [Asah] Yeah.
– I mean, at this point,
that’s a political flag
and how can they put it on City Hall?
So this stuff goes deep,
but there are a lot of notes
and a lot of connections.
But just what I was saying earlier,
if one of BLM’s demands
was defund the police,
you defunded the police, okay,
crime went up because anyone
who understands human psychology
realizes if you have no enforcement.
– Mm-hm.
– You’re gonna get
more bad behavior,
that’s just been known for
thousands of years, right?
– Right.
– And you’re still promoting it.
And if you see who finds-
– I gotta check to make sure
he doesn’t have a lighter, hold on.
– [Peter] Why?
– He’s not supposed to
have any sort of fire.
– [Peter] This guy?
– So he has conditions
of release, no fire.
– [Peter] Oh, you know this guy?
– Yes, he is originally from Seattle.
– [Peter] Oh, okay.
– He is a sex offender.
– [Peter] Okay, sitting
in front of City Hall
under the BLM flag.
– Under, yes.
– Okay.
– This morning, I reported
him to the state’s attorney
because he was in violation
of his 300 feet conditions of release.
– [Peter] So this is a sex offender?
– [Asah] Yep.
– [Peter] Is that illegal for
him to be there right now?
– He can be there,
conditions of his release
where he’s not supposed to be
within 300 feet of a certain restaurant,
and this morning, he was 25 feet from it
and he was harassing young women.
– [Peter] He was harassing
young women this morning?
– This morning, and I reported it.
– [Peter] Okay, and what’s
his record, do you know?
– Oh, it’s lengthy.
– [Peter] It’s deep.
– It’s deep, but he’s one of those cases
where he should be institutionalized.
– So those sitting here in City Hall.
– No.
– They’re oblivious, they don’t care,
they think they’re in
the right, what is it?
What is the mentality?
– I think that they-
– You didn’t answer this.
– No, I think that it’s
empathy to level 11.
– Oh, destructive empathy.
– Yes.
– That’s what destructive empathy is.
– Yes.
– On the surface, it looks great,
but not understanding
the second, third, fourth
order consequences.
– They don’t understand
the lasagna layers.
– Right, usually, destructive empathy
comes from privileged thinking,
as in you don’t have these
kinetic realities in your face.
Destructive empathy says, in
Brattleboro, where I just was,
they put up a cooler
for the fentanyl heads
to stand in front of the co-op,
and there’s a small bridge
everyone has to go over
if they’re walking.
And they enable that, not realizing,
oh, now you wouldn’t send
your kid to go get milk
for his mother who’s handicapped,
okay?
– Right.
– Now a couple wanting to start a life
in Vermont says, you know what?
Why don’t they just go over
the border in New Hampshire?
Yeah, the charm isn’t as high as Vermont,
no state income tax,
hey, and Keene is clean
and they don’t put up with that there.
– No.
– This is how the doom loop starts,
you’re in, like, let’s
say there’s five stages.
You’re in like stage two
and a half, three right now.
And then, the people that
are pushing these policies,
get their salary and their pensions
from the tax revenue of
all of these store owners
that work very hard to have a business
in a very difficult condition.
And then, you kill the tax base.
And then, so you have
these places people go to
and places people leave.
Now in Vermont, you’re in a luxury.
Three miles that way,
it’s almost countryside,
you don’t really see this.
– But, no, we are.
– You are.
– We are, it’s spreading.
It is spreading.
We’re seeing it in Williston,
it’s happening in Waterbury.
– [Peter] Okay.
– It’s not just, I said this to my mother
who lives in Waterbury, a year ago,
I said, “Just wait, yeah,”
– [Peter] I’m sorry just
to show you like this,
it was never all like-
– [Asah] No, no, no, no, no.
– [Peter] Broken up like this.
– It’s so sad.
– [Peter] Kyiv, Ukraine
is in much better shape
than this downtown.
– I don’t doubt it, I don’t doubt it.
– [Peter] How is that possible?
– I don’t know.
– [Peter] Okay, sorry to interrupt.
– No, a year ago, I said to my mother,
“Just wait, it’s coming.”
A month ago, three doors down from her,
a house that’s now an Airbnb,
huge federal bust, drug bust.
Guys were renting it,
selling fentanyl out of it,
you know, it was the whole thing, right?
– Okay, so it’s going a
little more statewide.
– It’s going statewide.
And again, you follow the
cases and the names overlap.
And when I listen into
these court hearings daily,
so many of these people have…
– What?
– So she, Crystal.
– [Peter] Crystal?
– Yep, and she uses him to steal for her.
He hit a store this morning, actually.
– I’m gonna talk to some store owners
this afternoon, actually.
– He hit Home Goods.
– Home Goods?
– Yeah.
– Okay, I’ll go there.
– Yeah.
You’ll see kids at King Street,
which is a youth center here in Burlington
being targeted to basically
become drug runners.
– [Peter] Oh.
– And that-
– [Peter] So the center is
keeping them off the streets.
– They’re trying to the best they can,
but they’re an easy target.
– [Peter] Yeah.
– When somebody can promise,
can give you all this
stuff that no one else can
and you maybe you are
first generation American,
you know, it’s something
that is pretty huge.
– Where is that place?
– It’s down the street here.
– I might stop by,
you think they’ll talk?
– Probably not.
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Now back to the story.
– [Worker] Up here.
– Oh, hi guys. (laughs)
– [Worker] On lunch.
– [Peter] Okay, what’s going on here?
– So, to our left, there’s the drug dealer
we were talking about
earlier and the pimp.
– [Peter] Okay, and then what’s going on,
we just have a little food?
– We have a free lunch
that happens every day.
This is the Food Not Cops,
this is part of the Black Lives Matter
and it’s on city property.
The people that come to
this lunch have records,
we often find tags from
local stores at these lunches
that have been recently shoplifted.
Merchants won’t say it on
camera, but they do not like.
– Okay, if you have to
have this, why not put it
in a place away from the
commerce and everything?
– [Asah] Right.
– What’s the point of that?
‘Cause that’s where everyone is, right?
– That’s where-
– Is that their logic? I’m
trying to think through it.
– Yeah, I mean, I guess
that’s their logic.
But why not put it over at the church?
– [Peter] Right.
– Why put it in the parking
garage, you know what I mean?
Like, this is where customers are parking.
– Yeah, and the point
isn’t to belittle people
having hard times.
– Yeah.
– But it’s to think
more logically through
these things, right?
Like, if you have your
biggest area of commerce
or pedestrian commerce in the whole state,
and then you’re making it so,
would you wanna bring your
kids down near a drug deal?
– Right.
– And if you’re saying a
lot of these, you know,
could be on drugs or other
issues, you just say,
you know what, I’ll just get in on Amazon
and not deal with that problem.
– Or go to Williston.
– [Peter] Williston, okay.
– Or South Burlington, you know,
a lot of this.
– Which looks nice now.
– Which looks really nice.
A lot of people moved to Williston
or a lot of businesses moved to Williston.
– [Peter] Okay.
(birds chirping)
This is security.
– Yes, we’re here.
– Security.
– [Peter] What’s going on?
How are things these days?
– Getting better since I’ve been doing it.
– [Peter] You’re good at your job.
– I hope to be, I try to be, but in terms-
– He’s really good at his job.
– In terms of stuff happening back here,
I mean, five of these
people have stolen from us
in like last three months.
This guy here with a little crossbody bag
and the backwards hat,
that was a purse snatcher.
– Okay, so the purse
snatcher snatches his purses,
then comes in the back and gets a hot meal
and goes back to work.
– Yep.
– Yep.
This guy in the white hat
stole from us on Monday.
– Yeah, Kai.
– Where?
– Kai.
The guy in the white hat.
– [Peter] He stole from you on Monday?
– Yeah.
– White hat.
So it’s the gift that
keeps on giving in a way.
– (laughs) Yep.
– [Peter] So if someone
grabs something in the store,
can you stop them?
– Yes.
– Okay, cool.
– So,
we’re privately owned, so Mark
who you’ll meet and talk to,
he’s the owner, you know,
we’re very careful with it.
I try to only, you know,
grab our goods, right?
Even if it’s in their bag,
grabbing their bag is dicey.
So if you just touch what’s ours,
there’s nothing wrong.
– Yeah.
I mean, that’s the thing is
like this fine line, you know,
law will tell us you’re
thieving from the thieves,
even though you know it’s
stolen, as a private citizen,
if we see somebody stealing
from Lulu, for example,
Lululemon.
– Yeah, yeah.
– I can’t physically go to that thief
and remove that property from them.
– [Peter] If you work for Lulu.
– No, if I don’t work,
but even if Lulu says,
“Hey, can you go get that person for me?”
I can’t do that, I’ll be
accused of being a thief.
– [Peter] You’re the criminal.
– I become a criminal.
– [Peter] Okay, that makes sense,
doesn’t it?
– Totally, yeah.
– [Peter] Society works really
well when it’s like that.
– Yeah, totally.
– When nobody calls out the bad behavior.
– Right.
– Yeah, that’s cool.
– Yeah.
– And Lulu is,
I tried to talk to the
security guard, great guy.
– Phenomenal.
– He would’ve said a
million things on camera.
– But he can’t.
– But the higher up said he can’t.
– Yeah.
– So you’re with a
better security company.
– Well, I’m just with Homeport.
– [Peter] Oh, okay.
– Just hired by Mark.
And it’s been very helpful for us,
even if it leaves the
store, like, I can go down,
track it down and get it back.
– Yeah, he’ll send me a message
and send me a picture of somebody,
and because I kind of
have eyes everywhere,
we call them mother eyes,
I literally have eyes
everywhere in the city,
and within 10 minutes, I usually
know where the person is.
– I mean, yeah, you found the person
and we got the stuff back
like 20 minutes after they left our store.
– Yeah.
– And they were across town.
– Well, I found you
pretty quickly.
– Yeah.
And they were there across town,
they thought they got away with it.
– [Peter] Thank you for
all your time because-
– Oh no, for sure, no.
– I know you have to go.
– I know, I got another kid
going to college. (laughs)
– Not at UVM.
– No, UNH.
– Wow.
– I have two kids going to
school in New Hampshire.
– The town they’re in,
is it better than Burlington right now?
– Hand over fist.
All the college towns in New Hampshire,
you would not see any of this.
– [Peter] Okay.
– And so, for a fraction of the price,
I have two kids going to
school in New Hampshire.
– Wait, let me get this straight.
So as a Vermonter,
it’s cheaper to send
your kids to state school
in New Hampshire than Vermont.
– Yeah.
– And the town’s way safer.
– Way safer, way nicer, way safer.
– And if you live there,
there’s no state income tax.
– Right.
– So it’s like they take
in more tax revenue here,
I get it, there’s less
industry here, less people.
– Yeah.
– But they take in a lot
more from their citizens.
– Yeah.
– And then the social contract,
as in I’m gonna provide
you safety and security
and take care of things,
they’re not really holding
that part of the bargain,
compared to where your daughters
are at in New Hampshire.
– My son and, yeah.
– Son and daughter.
– Yeah.
– That’s wild.
– It’s nuts.
– Whoever thought as a
Vermonter, you’d be like,
I gotta send my kids to New Hampshire.
– Not in a million years, no.
– It’s sort of hits
some pride, doesn’t it?
– No, it’s-
– Are you gonna start drinking
the maple syrup from there?
– I have to say, it’s a bit of a…
– It hits you in the gut.
– It does, it really does.
– So you’re gonna be drinking
Live Free or Die maple syrup.
– Yeah, the third one,
I’m hoping goes to UVM,
just to like, at least
get one to go to UVM.
– Okay, so I know you have to go,
and I didn’t ask the question
yet, why are you doing this?
Is that the reason?
So you can have your
son go to school here?
– No, why is I love my
state, I love Vermont.
I am doing this because
I wanna bring back,
this is not Vermont, what
is happening is not Vermont.
This is a state of emergency,
this is an epidemic.
And I have been fighting tooth and nail
for somebody to actually say
that out loud, declare it.
– You just did today
– Really, I mean, I’ve been
in emergency management,
this is a health crisis through the roof,
we need to deal with the
drugs that are on our street
before it’s too late,
before we become Portland, Oregon,
San Francisco, we need to do something.
– [Peter] Yeah, you’re great.
– And I learn their names,
I learn their stories.
– More people need to stand up like you.
And we actually have the store
owner who’s gonna talk next,
so I’m excited for that.
– And he and I talk about it together
and we know and then we do it together,
I mean, it’s, I don’t know,
it was really, really good
to meet you.
– Thank you for
taking your time.
– I wish we had more time.
– I know you have to leave.
– Yeah, it was so good.
– But thank you,
appreciate it.
– Your friend said, isn’t
Homeport where they-
– Yeah.
– What did she say? What?
– Homeport hate homeless people?
And I was like, no.
– I don’t think so.
– That’s on the record, you
hate homeless people here.
Is that what you’re saying?
Or humans all together?
– Well, apparently, I
don’t know, you know?
It depends whether you believe
what you read in the press.
– Okay, so that’s what
they marked you with
when you wrote a letter
talking about the situation,
the reverb was-
– The reverb was these businesses
wanna criminalize homelessness.
– [Peter] Okay, and what
did you really want?
– Some meaningful
consequences for misbehavior.
Not, in fact, imprisonment, but you know,
maybe a trespass or something
for a little while or something.
– [Peter] Okay, can we step out?
‘Cause I wanna see
your beautiful store.
– Yeah, yeah, sure.
– [Peter] How long have you owned this?
– We’ve owned the business for 40 years.
– Oh wow, that’s huge
success, that’s hard to do.
– I mean, we have a family,
you know, it’s a family business.
So we are here in the store and it helps.
– And it was Pier One back in the day.
– Back in the day.
– I remember going in, yeah.
– Yeah.
– Okay, so someone’s
coming in into your store,
let’s go into your store, is that cool?
– Absolutely.
– [Peter] Okay, so someone’s gonna come in
and steal something, say your
security’s on lunch break.
– Exactly.
– Say I catch ’em somewhere in the store,
I see them put something in
their bag or in their pocket.
If I suspect you, but I’m uncertain,
you haven’t broken the rules in my eyes.
Suspicion is not stealing.
I have to see you pocket or bag an item.
– [Peter] Okay, so good thieves
are gonna steal here all day.
– They could, but often, we are onto it,
we see somebody pocket something,
we see them make their way to the door.
and I try to block the door here.
– You get in front?
– I don’t really, I’ll say, you know,
because I try to be respectful of people
and so, I’ll say, you know,
“Hey, is there something
you’d like to, you know,
you forgot to pay for
or something like that?”
I always give people the
benefit of the doubt,
right to the bitter end.
I’ve been doing this all my life,
I’ve been doing this for
40 years in this business
and I’ve been in other
retail business as well.
I’ve stopped a lot of thieves at the door.
Up until three years ago, to a person,
everyone’s gone, “Ha, you caught me.”
You know, they may say, “No, I didn’t.”
And I, “Come on, I saw you,”
and they go, “All right, you got me.”
They give the stuff back
or they go pay for it
or they cry or they do, you know?
About three years ago for the first time,
I got pushed through that door.
– [Peter] Right here?
– Right here.
– [Peter] Oh.
– Just, “You, you know, go to hell.”
I said, “Hey, you know
I’m gonna call the cops.”
Oh no, it’s, “What are you gonna do?”
“I’m gonna call the cops.”
“What are they gonna
do? They’re not coming.”
I’m like, “Give it, you know,
you can’t steal from here,
get outta here, you’re not welcome back,”
and that was the end of that instance.
We’ve gotten a little, like,
I didn’t know what to do in the moment,
I’ve never had anybody do that.
– [Peter] Right.
– Right?
– So we’ve refined our approach now.
I’ll hang onto a bag, I
won’t touch a human being,
I won’t grab you by the arm or anything,
but if I know you got my goods in the bag,
I’m hanging onto that bag
and you’re gonna have to
drag me through that door.
– Okay, how much theft,
what dollar amount of theft
do you think you deal with
a year, rough estimate?
– Rough estimate,
I think it’s gone down
since we’ve hired security.
However, before that, it was
probably about 75,000 bucks.
– [Peter] Brutal.
– Brutal.
– [Peter] Because, businesses like these,
with all this inventory, are
super easy to run, I heard.
– Yes.
– Insurances, getting employees.
– It’s all profit.
We have a big, big pot
of gold in the back.
– You’re an owner, you
just sit back and relax?
– I just gaze over my kingdom.
– [Peter] Because this is pretty
easy, can we walk through?
– [Mark] Yeah, sure.
– [Peter] Yeah, so you got
everything here, you got cards.
– [Mark] Lot of stuff.
– [Peter] Very cool cards,
all the way to spices and hot sauces.
– [Mark] Yeah,
it’s a department store.
– Cooking pans.
– And there’s toys and furniture upstairs,
there’s candles and bath
up on the mezzanine level.
– So a place like this is super
important for the community,
you’re gonna say that obviously
’cause it’s your store.
– Sure, sure.
– But as an outsider, it
is, like, you can come here.
– I mean, we feel, listen,
we feel really symbiotic
with the community,
I mean, we’ve been here
a long time, right?
– [Peter] Yeah.
– So like at the end of COVID,
this community came and
supported the hell out of us.
And I think they did that
because they feel that we
add value to their community,
have felt that over the, you know,
previous 38 years or whatever,
that we had added value to their community
’cause they really did,
they came out in a time
when retail really needed their help.
– [Peter] Yep.
– And kept us going.
– [Peter] Nice old building here.
– It’s an old Montgomery Ward.
– [Peter] Oh, is that
an old department store?
– Yeah, they’ve got buildings like this
that look identical to
this all over the country.
– [Peter] Okay.
– There’s one in Newport
that looks almost identical.
– How many tags do you
have here, like 15 million?
– (laughs) There’s about 47,000
items on my inventory list.
– [Peter] Oh my God.
– And I probably have about 70% of that
in stock at any time.
– [Peter] So you’re a bit insane,
fair to say, a little bit?
– It’s a nutty business,
it’s not for everyone,
but you know, it’s a family,
like, I grew up in this,
so my dad’s been doing it for years.
– Okay.
– My son’s here with me.
– Cool.
– Get my grandson in pricing on the-
– That’s awesome.
– On the weekends and during the holidays.
So it really is a family,
and my wife works here,
it’s a family business.
– That’s awesome,
it’s good to see small
businesses thriving.
– I mean, we enjoy what we do.
– It’s important.
– We love our community,
we love our business,
and you’re right, it is crazy business.
And that is in fact what
makes it hard to compete with.
All those skews, all the differences,
you know, Amazon can
compete with us, but you
never make a friend at Amazon.
– Can’t have this experience,
yeah.
– You don’t support your
community at Amazon,
you don’t come in and get
to see a friendly face.
Like, we believe in the 3D world
where people interact with each other.
– [Peter] Agreed.
– And our customers do too.
– [Peter] Cool store, huh?
– It’s great, it’s exactly what I need.
I have to bring my roommate here.
It’s my first time though, but.
– [Mark] Welcome.
– [Student] I’m just moving into UVM.
– Oh, are you?
– I am.
– [Mark] Where from? Where’s home?
– I’m from Miami.
– [Mark] Oh, no kidding.
– Yeah.
– [Peter] Are you okay? I’m
filming a video on the place.
– Yeah, no problem.
– Okay, cool.
– Hey squad, what’s up?
Getting this for my dorm.
Isn’t she cute? I’ll
take name suggestions.
– [Peter] So Betty, this is your mother?
– Yeah.
– [Peter] And what do you do here, Betty?
– I do the accounting.
– [Peter] Okay,
how’s that going for ya?
– Buying some greeting cards,
I love it.
– [Peter] You love crunching the numbers?
– Oh, she buys the cards.
– I love crunching the numbers.
– [Peter] And this is your wife, Mark?
– This is my wife.
– Okay.
– She looks after
the lower level here,
which is garden and that kind of stuff.
– Yes.
– [Peter] Okay, so you’re
all one big family,
but y’all have your specific tasks?
– We got our areas, domains of interest.
– It works very, very well.
– There’s a lot of harmony.
– Oh, absolutely.
– Absolutely.
– Yeah.
– This business, because it exists,
has taken care of you guys first, then us,
then also our kids and their family.
This is the life we got.
– We need, we go to school,
we get, you know, go to
college when we need,
like this has provided for the whole show.
– Yeah, this is it.
– Wow, wow.
– And the lives of so many
of our employees, you know?
– The ones who come back
after a couple of decades
to run our sidewalk sale every year.
Terry, who’s been here for 40 years,
since before we opened our
doors, to have long term,
hate to say employees because
they’re more than that,
they are, they become family.
– [Mark] After 40 years, sure.
– [Peter] And so, you never ask age,
but what year were you born,
if you don’t mind me asking?
– 1943.
– [Peter] Oh wow.
– From a family of retailers.
– And I grew up
under the racks in retail.
– [Peter] Okay, so this
is the last iteration.
Is that what this is
here? The end of the DNA?
– It’s the next.
– His son is 14.
– No, his son is the one
that comes in and works with us.
– It’s true.
– Yeah.
– [Peter] Okay, one, two,
three, four generations.
– [Both] Yeah.
– That’s beautiful.
– 40 years, 40 years more.
– Yeah, now you’re talking.
– Yeah, do another 40.
– Yeah.
– Thank you, appreciate it.
– Yeah, my pleasure.
– Good luck with everything.
– Oh, thank you so much.
– My goal is to come back
here in a couple years
and we talk about, oh remember
2023-24, that rocky bottom.
– My goal is to make it
a distant memory too.
– Okay.
(Mark chuckling)
– [Peter] Homeport, and
you do stuff online too?
– We do.
– [Peter] Okay, so if
someone’s not in Burlington?
– HomeportOnline.com.
– [Peter] HomeportOnline.com, take care.
– Cheers.
– So awesome seeing a
family business like that.
Four generations, that’s
something special,
something that should be cherished.
So when you see it
happening, it’s really cool.
Ben & Jerry’s from Vermont,
and I believe it was two July 4ths ago,
they said on Twitter,
“It was time to give all our
land back to the natives.”
And in something like that,
I forget the exact words,
and I wonder if Ben &
Jerry’s the ownership,
that being Ben or Jerry,
if you’re out there,
I would love to get an answer,
or even the business have
given their land back.
’cause I know Ben & Jerry
have done very well, extremely well,
they sold out to the big Unilever,
I forget the amount, but quite a bit.
And wow, Americans have been buying
their ice cream for
decades, great ice cream.
But I’m curious, you know, have
they given their land back?
If they have, then, hey, stake
the claim and your argument
and at least you believe what you say.
I would be interested to
know if that’s taken place.
(car engine rumbling)
– All day long, they’re on the steps.
They go to the bathroom on
the walls of the church.
They shoot their drugs,
I just saw one last week,
a guy, there was a girl
standing next to him,
it was his friend, he shot
her in the neck with a needle.
I never seen anything like this.
It’s all day long, they fight,
they beat each other up,
they leave trash all over the place.
The ambulance comes in,
the police comes up,
they disperse ’em, they
go across the street.
Two days later, they’re back.
They go behind the parking
garage right here all day long.
I mean, this is constant.
– [Peter] This is your business?
– Right here? Yeah.
– Okay, how long have you been here?
– Since 1970.
– Okay, is this the worst
you’ve seen it in Burlington?
– Listen, I’ve been here most of my life.
Never, ever, ever seen
Burlington like this.
I mean, I got people don’t
even wanna come downtown,
to go to downtown, you know,
I used to work on a lot
of people, their cars,
they say, “Where you located?”
“Downtown.” “No, I don’t
wanna come downtown.”
Nobody wants to come downtown anymore,
they’re scaring all the
customers, all the shoppers.
– [Peter] Right.
– All the visitors, I mean,
they’re on every corner.
If you really want to see something,
come in between six and
nine o’clock in the morning,
that’s when I come open the
store across the street.
– Yeah.
– They’re all over.
They come in, they’re
drugged up out of their mind,
they steal stuff from the store.
I mean, it’s all day long.
– [Peter] What needs to happen?
– What need to happen? I’ve
been telling this to everybody.
They need to get the
police back downtown again
and they need to enforce the laws, okay?
Let me tell you.
Three, four years ago,
you couldn’t smoke on Church Street.
If you smoked on Church Street
or you’d ride your bike,
you would get a ticket.
– [Peter] Cigarettes?
– Cigarettes, correct, cigarettes.
Now they use drugs on Church Street,
they ride bicycles on Church Street,
they smashed all the
windows on Church Street.
Nothing happens.
– Where are you from originally?
– I’m from Lebanon.
– Okay, so you know a different world,
you can compare and contrast.
– Never seen it like this
in Burlington, Vermont.
Listen, this is my home, okay?
– Yep.
– I’ve been here all my life
and I’m not moving any place.
– Okay, why are so many
people so scared to speak?
– Because if you say something,
you’re probably gonna get
attacked by other people,
say, “No, you shouldn’t
be talking like that.”
But you know what?
If you deal with these, with
people like this all day long,
every day, every day, 12 hours a day,
at the point, there’s a break point.
– You’re there.
– I’m there.
I mean, you just, it’s tough,
it’s constantly all day long.
It’s like, you know, I
get a lot of them, I help,
I see the homeless guys, they’re
really old, they need help.
I have no problem.
We had homeless people here before,
we help them out, we take care of ’em,
they never caused any problems,
you know, they just had a problem.
You know what? We all got problems.
And I don’t mind helping
people like that, and I do,
but when we get to the
point, they’re violent,
you know, they have mental stuff
that I can’t control and I can’t help ’em,
and they’re on the street,
they don’t get fed well, okay?
They don’t get their medication right,
they just go from one corner to the other.
– If you had a teenage son or daughter,
would you let them
downtown here on their own?
– Absolutely not, absolutely not,
I’ll be afraid.
– Okay,
that’s the difference of when I grew up.
– Me too.
– You could walk down here, no problem.
– You know what?
I used to leave the cars unlocked
and no problems.
– Right here?
And that wouldn’t be a good idea,
there’s something going on here, right?
These guys are hopped up probably.
– Yeah.
– Oh man, I’m sorry.
– We need to bring downtown
back the way it was,
we’re losing businesses.
I’m talking to a lot of
business owners downtown,
most of ’em say that business is down,
nobody wants to come down and shop.
They have to ask the people
to move first thing in the morning,
they’re laying in front of
the door to get in the store.
I mean, when this is gonna stop?
– When is it gonna stop is
when the policies change.
– That’s right, that’s
right, the policies-
– When you enforce the laws
and when people like you
speak up in more unison,
a lot of people are scared to talk,
today, the beginning of my video,
I couldn’t get anyone to talk,
then I found this woman
Asah and then a store owner.
But it takes a lot of people to speak up
and then call out the BS because it’s BS.
– Let me ask you this.
Most of these people are young people.
They’re healthy.
– Yeah.
– They’re strong.
Everyone looking for people to work,
why don’t we get somebody
from the Howard Center
to talk to these folks, find them jobs?
Wouldn’t that be better to go
out and work and work hard,
make money, get an apartment?
– Yeah, of course, it would.
Logically speaking, but people on drugs,
they’re covering something up
most likely in their lives.
You’re not dealing with, you
know, people in a great place,
so somehow I agree with you,
you have to give it your all.
I think through job training,
through rehab, through medical.
And if people don’t
wanna correct themselves,
then there’s nothing you can do,
but you can’t let ’em be down
here, the younger the better.
– But somebody gotta help ’em,
what’s gonna happen
every day you take drugs,
every day, every day, every day?
What’s gonna happen at the end?
Two things, either you’re
gonna die, all right?
Or you’re gonna overdose and
something is gonna go bad,
then you’re never gonna come back.
You see, there’s gotta
be an answer to this,
by giving them what
they need, that’s fine,
it’s a temporarily fix,
but not long term fix.
– [Peter] No.
– They need help, they need somebody,
they need therapy, they
need to go right to rehab,
they need to do something.
– And I’ll tell you what,
if you allow it here
and make it easier to do here,
you’ll attract those people
from the surrounding region
and go the path of least resistance,
and that’s why Burlington’s
one of those hubs right now,
Brattleboro too, I was down there.
– Yeah.
– You go over to the border
to Keene, New Hampshire,
I’m sure there are
problems, but it looks fine,
you could take your kids down
there, there’d be no issues.
– That’s right, you know,
I went to Plattsburgh,
there was no issues,
here, what’s happening?
I saw some new people that just pulled in.
– [Peter] Yeah.
– Today, and asked them,
“Where you guys from?”
“Bennington.”
I said, “How did you get here?”
“We took the bus over here,
they told us here it’s easier
to live with our problem.”
I said, “Really?”
Yeah, I mean, so you see,
it’s exactly what’s happening,
they’re coming from the surrounding area.
When you got 250, what are you gonna do?
You’re overpopulated, how
are you gonna feed them?
How are they gonna eat?
Where are they gonna go to the bathroom?
Where they gonna sleep?
– I think you should pay more taxes.
– Me?
– Yeah.
– My taxes just increased.
– I’m just being a smart.
– I’m just telling you,
my taxes increased.
– How much?
– Well, we have a bunch
of properties, you know,
that we own a lot of properties
in the city of Burlington,
and that’s why we invest in Burlington
because we like Burlington.
– Yep.
– We probably paid, if I
tell you, I don’t want,
over a million dollars in taxes.
What do I get out of it?
I can’t get any police protection,
the street, I gotta
clean it every morning,
I go out and clean the
garbage from all over here.
– [Resident] You get nothing.
– What do you get out of it?
Just tell me what I’m getting out.
– You get the good feeling
of knowing you paid for some pensions,
you paid for some pensions,
you feel good about that?
– You know what? Pension is good.
Like I said, I don’t mind
helping these people,
but they gotta try helping
themself a little bit
so I can help ’em more.
But the way they’re doing it,
they’re just not taking
care of the problem.
The problem is the drugs.
Take a picture across the street,
you told me this is normal
when you got 40 people
sitting on the church,
that’s not normal.
– I’m a business owner in Burlington,
I’ve been a resident of Vermont
for 37 and a half years,
I came out of New York City,
I had a drug problem, okay?
And I came up here to
change my life around
and it worked out for
me, so I’m fortunate.
But the experiences in
Burlington right now
that I’ve noticed since COVID,
we’ve really gone downhill,
on a scale from one to 10,
I look at Burlington as a two right now.
And what’s unfortunate about
it is that I don’t see any fix.
I see people walking around the problem
that are getting paid to
help fix the problems.
I don’t see them active doing anything,
other than relying on other
people to put out the fire,
put up money, put up housing.
There are plenty of rich people,
this is one of the richest
college communities
in the country, and nobody
is letting these people,
they’re walking around on
the street, pick them up,
give ’em some warmth,
put ’em in a camp on King
Johnson like they did for COVID.
Give ’em some shelter
for at least 30 days.
– Yeah, but AC-
– 30 days rehab.
– Yeah, ACLU.
– I don’t know, you know,
I’m not a politician.
– Yeah, I know, but it’s unsustainable.
– You know, I just pray that,
I don’t think it’s gonna
happen anytime soon.
But I’m willing to participate
if I can help the city.
because I have a very good business.
I’m in the cannabis business
and we’re doing very well.
I’m handing the state
51,000 to 60,000 a month,
I’m collecting taxes for the state, okay?
And the municipality,
and a lot of people are
getting these funds,
where are they going?
I’d rather put my funds
right into where I work,
right around here within
a 500 foot radius.
I’m willing, I’ve had
people in my alleyway
right here in Burlington,
ODing, dying in front of me,
people bleeding, okay?
And then they’re walking to City Hall
and they’re walking around it.
I couldn’t go to work knowing
there’s a guy on the ground.
No, no way.
So I don’t know what they’re trying to do,
are we trying to scare
people out of Burlington
and build up South Burlington?
Is that the new biggest city in Vermont?
South Burlington is in Williston.
– The money’s
going there right now?
– Yes.
– Okay.
– Yes, the money’s going there.
The $11 million bridge that crosses 89
that they’re putting in
to go to the gateway of South Burlington,
put the 11 million back here.
Are you trying to chase out
the people to come down here?
They’re trying to kill Burlington.
– [Peter] Who’s they?
– I think that the
progressives in Burlington
are trying to not help us.
Bernie keeps talking about it,
his whole, David Zuckerman,
but I don’t see anything
really getting done.
They’re parading around the
state, looking for votes,
but they’re not working down here.
– [Peter] Well, you think
this would be the place?
‘Cause all the people live here.
– This was, listen, I came here
because this was a
beautiful, cosmopolitan city
with police protection and
oversight for the kids,
I felt safe here.
Now I don’t feel safe here.
I have to buy a commuting car, okay?
To come to work because it’s
unsafe, because I’ve been,
in fact, there’s a
gentleman in the paper today
that approached the city with
an ax and he was arrested,
he smashed me in the face in my alley,
I never even called the cops, a young kid,
I’m not gonna start a
fight, I’m 73 years old.
Well, guess what? Six months
later, he’s got an ax, okay?
He’s on the front page
of the papers today,
Jason somebody, okay?
So it’s unfortunate, I don’t
know really what to say.
I’m leaving work now
because I don’t wanna
be around here later on,
it gets dangerous.
– You’re really worried about
being down here at night?
– Oh yeah.
And I grew up in Eastern
New York, Brooklyn,
you know where that is?
– Yeah, of course, East New York.
– You ever hear of “Goodfellas”?
Okay, that’s a true story
about what kind of bad bit
neighborhoods can get, so.
What you’ve got right around here
are a lot of poverty pimps, okay?
You got a lot of people here
that have duplexes,
teachers, professionals,
Airbnb-ing their apartments
out for 2-300 a day.
Why aren’t they helping these people?
Why don’t one of ’em donate
two, three houses, okay?
They’re not donating nothing,
they’re knocking that down over there
to put up an $11 million building
that the city raised money for.
What are they gonna do?
Let the rest of the buildings deteriorate?
They’re gonna move one?
You’ve been to East New York, okay,
you’ve been to projects, you understand.
What do they wanna burn
down the neighborhood?
– [Peter] I mean, that’s-
– I just think the college was gonna be-
– It almost makes more sense, honestly,
if you think like they’re
trying to move development
to another area because it’s so logical
what needs to happen here.
– San Francisco.
– So basic, I lived there,
I moved out of there three years ago.
– So you know what’s going
on, are the homeless gone?
– No.
– They moved a lot out.
– Homeless industrial complex,
as you’re talking about,
there’s a lot of money
to be made, it’s endless.
– Listen, I like you.
– The is endless.
– I used to, yeah, turn that off.
– All right.
– This is called the tunnel.
Has anybody told you that yet?
– [Peter] Well, yeah, the parking garage?
– No, that thing, that brick thing.
– [Peter] Oh, that’s where the stairs are.
– [Resident] That’s called the tunnel.
– [Peter] Okay, what’s that mean?
– That’s a word on the street,
that if you need drugs,
you go to the tunnel
and you go to each fight
and you could buy all your drugs.
– [Peter] Okay, great, so you
can’t go down the stairs now
in the parking garage.
– I don’t know, I don’t know.
On weekends, it’s very bad here.
I had a customer walk in and out,
she got robbed out of her
pocketbook the other day,
she came in crying.
We’ve had a lot of
things that are happening
because the police won’t respond
to a nonviolent altercation, I guess.
– I gotta stick up
for the cops a little bit.
– I love the cops.
– Here’s why.
They were totally put under
the bus four years ago.
– I agree with this.
– And then, like, would you
wanna show up to your job
and do the dirty work of society?
– I’d give them the medal of honor?
– Yeah, yeah, me too.
We need good cops,
and I’m sure there are a
lot of good cops there,
I’m sure there are a few bad ones, right?
That’s just how it goes in anything.
– In anything, nothing,
it’s not a perfect world.
– But we need better cops
and we need to raise them up
because they’re doing the dirty work.
Cops aren’t here,
this thing falls apart
in 24 hours, all of it.
– If it was up to me right now.
– Yeah.
– I would pay to have the
National Guard come here, okay?
You understand?
You understand that?
On a Friday night, you
know these college kids,
what’s gonna really happen in Vermont?
Are they waiting for the
college kids to really get hurt?
In that parking garage, last year,
there were two kids that were
assaulted and shot at, okay?
Right in there, they
walked home from the bar,
from Red Square to the parking lot,
a guy tried to rob him, they
jumped the guy, he shot,
you know, it’s bad.
– [Peter] So the university isn’t feeling
the effects of this yet?
– Oh yeah, they’re telling their students,
“Don’t even come down here
with more than one kid,” okay?
Don’t ever come downtown Burlington, no.
I mean, my walks of life, right?
I hear people go, “We will
never drive down to Burlington.”
My business model is
strictly high residential,
right around here.
Customers will rather
spend 30, $40 on a product
and go to Essex before they come here.
They don’t care about it,
Burlington is now really,
unfortunately, a ghetto.
You see, every town has an
uptown and a downtown, okay?
Our downtown is all downtown,
there’s no upbeat at all
left, none, strictly gone.
It really got hurt bad
when they took away the farmer’s market,
that camaraderie and smorgasbord.
They blamed it on the trees were old.
What, are you kidding me?
You ruined the vibrance of the city, okay?
You ruined it, and they
won’t even bring it back,
all these buildings are empty.
Listen, we need help, if you can help us.
– [Peter] Well, I’m doing it with a video,
that’s what I can do.
– Please.
– You know, it takes
courage to tell the truth,
but at least you’re telling the truth.
– And that’s why I got the shirts.
– I didn’t even see that.
– Seek the Truth ’cause it’s hard to find.
– I’ve had this idea.
– You gotta seek it.
– I’m gonna go see Charlie now.
– All right, boss.
Guys, Seek the Truth, new merch line.
(car engine roaring)
Something happening outta
that truck, a group up here.
And then everyone doing their drugs
on the front steps of the church.
Got a bunch of people
looking at me from behind.
So I’m gonna move through
here somewhat quickly,
but that’s what we’ve got.
I can’t imagine the churchgoers
being too happy about this.
And who wants to go to this church now?
That is wild.
We’ve got a mini Kensington,
Philadelphia back there
where I just did a video recently
where they allow open air drug
usage, open air drug market,
and it is absolutely horrific.
I’ve been to Karachi,
Pakistan in the slums there,
a place called Lyari, pretty hard hitting,
and the slums of India,
and Kensington had the hardest feel
pretty much of any place
I’ve been on this planet.
And while it’s not that bad here,
it’s not going in the right direction.
An open air drug usage is, in my opinion,
an absolutely terrible idea.
And for those that feel otherwise,
go to Kensington, walk
the streets, check it out.
All right, back to Church Street,
let’s talk to like one more business,
just get another opinion,
see if it’s uniform or any different.
– Every time I try to get
in touch with the governor,
I can’t.
And I wanted to ask the governor,
’cause I’ve heard different things
about the safe injection site
and that they’re gonna
give us money for it, okay?
And that we’ll build
something for that purpose.
I’m confused because just down the street
is the empty Department
of Health building,
which could serve as
a safe site injection.
– [Peter] Do you want that?
– Well, I want something,
because, my driveway,
my front steps and my backyard
and my front yard at my
house are not safe, not safe.
– [Peter] How long have you lived here?
– September 25th, I’ll be 73.
– So from the beginning?
– All my life.
– [Peter] Okay.
– I am a dug in Vermonter.
– [Peter] So tell us,
what are your thoughts?
– Well, I’ll tell you
what bothers me, okay?
– [Peter] Yeah.
– Not too long ago,
a would-be customer was
gonna come in the store
and saw me interacting
with homeless drug addicts
that had shot up in the driveway
and one of them was
defecating in the driveway.
And so, I got a little hot,
he described it on Google
that I was yelling at him
and he’d never come to my store.
I’d love to have him come
to my store to understand,
this is 24/7 here, this
isn’t just once in a while,
this is every single day.
It’s on the church lawns,
it’s in our parking garage.
– It’s right behind you.
– It’s right in back of me.
And sometimes, this is no kidding,
I come from my home in Burlington
and I don’t know what I’m gonna expect
when I pull in my driveway, okay?
I go from my work to my home,
which is just up near the hospital,
and I don’t know what I’m
gonna find on my front porch.
I’ve had people sleep in
my yard, sleep on my porch.
And when I wake them, it’s my problem.
– You’re the bad person
in that equation?
– I’m the bad person
in this, okay?
– Well, you need eight hours
of sleep, didn’t you know that?
It’s a joke, it’s a joke.
– Yeah, that’s a real joke
’cause I wake up every
couple hours, you know?
And some of the stuff that go by my house
at night or early in the morning,
the abusive language we
hear on a regular basis.
These folks don’t have
soft voices downtown,
they’re yelling blocks away at each other
for either a bad drug deal
or you owe ’em money or this or that.
I mean, a few years back,
we witnessed a man get stabbed in the neck
with a pair of scissors by the shoe shop,
by another homeless man
’cause he owed him 20 bucks.
He died, he bled out right here.
They tried to revive him, they couldn’t.
I saved the same person
out in back of our building
with Narcan and she was
mad at me for doing it.
I spoiled her high, and the
words out of her mouth were,
“I’m gonna have to go do
another trick for that.”
What do you think that trick was?
A man taking advantage of her, probably.
– [Peter] In your opinion,
when did it really start going downhill?
– You want my true opinion?
– [Peter] Yeah.
– When there was no law and order
in Washington DC on January 6th,
the world went to hell
in a hen basket, okay?
When George Floyd and the Black movement
and Black Lives Matter,
I think some people
took advantage of that,
the loss of his life and
a couple police officers
that didn’t do the right thing.
And I think there’s no law
and order here, it’s a show,
criminals have more rights than we do.
And it is time to end the show.
It’s sad, I mean, there
are people out there
that will tell you with
the Burlington businesses,
“Oh it’s gonna pass, it’s okay.”
No, it’s not.
We have to stop feeding the
animals, we have to say no.
If you want us to feed you,
you need to do something
for the community.
I don’t care if you’re high or not,
once you come off your high,
you could go around and
help us pick up trash,
get our city back to what we want.
We’re paying taxes for this.
– [Peter] What about city government?
Why aren’t they changing?
It’s all policies, right,
at the end of the day?
– Yeah, policies, yes.
But there’s a lot of people out there
breaking the ordinances,
the city ordinances,
the things that they put on, you know,
in books of what our city ordinances are.
Don’t block my driveway, pay
your tickets, pay your meters,
clean up after for your dog.
Don’t throw trash on my sidewalk,
it’s littering, it’s a $200 fine.
People don’t wanna press this.
They cite ’em, they go to court,
they let ’em home or homeless.
What are you gonna do?
You know the democratic
caucus is talking about joy,
you know, Trump and his cronies
are talking about all these things
that they’re gonna put back.
I don’t wanna go back to Trump,
Trump needs to go in a trunk, I’m sorry,
it’s just like I shoot
straight from the hip
and I’m not loaded with a weapon, okay?
Our voices are our most important weapons
and we need to use them.
– And why do you think so many people
are scared to speak out?
– For retaliation.
They find out who you are, where you live,
people do strange things, you know?
– So it’s that lawless here right now?
– Kind of sort of feel that way.
– But if people don’t speak up then,
nothing changes.
– Right.
And it’s not that I’m not
a compassionate person,
you have to understand.
– No, you don’t even have to
explain it, this is basic logic
and common sense.
– It is.
– We all agreed on 10
years ago, 10 years ago,
it wasn’t a question any of this stuff.
– Right, exactly.
– People have mental health
issues, they need help.
– And there’s a vacant building
that the Department of Health left vacant.
The state of Vermont opens
it, they’d rather sell it,
and who knows what will go in there
when they’ve got a building
they can put to use.
So what is wrong with people?
Let’s make our state and our
city government accountable
for what we’re suffering.
– Is there any unity?
I’ve talked to some great people today,
you being one of ’em, is there any unity?
Are you guys getting
together and doing anything?
Because one voice at a time is awesome,
but, like, where’s the movement?
– Well, we have the app that
businesses have that they can,
when something’s going on downtown,
we can find out and help one another.
– [Peter] But that’s between you guys.
– That’s our community,
our downtown community,
it’s not the-
– [Peter] Like, how do you
get as organized as BLM?
They were very effective,
like, how do you get that movement?
– Fear.
– [Peter] People are just scared.
– I think so, I think so.
There used to be one
homeless shelter in this town
and it may have at times been
full to capacity, you know,
nut the homeless folks that
I recall being on our street,
they weren’t shooting up
out in broad daylight,
they were just holding a tall
one, an open container, okay?
– [Peter] The good old days.
– The good old days, but
they knew the businesses
and they knew what
businesses would help them.
And we had regular
people that would come in
and let us know they made
it through the weekend,
and these guys were
awesome guys, you know?
They knew to say, you know,
“Stay away from that alley,
you know, that’s private property.
Be nice to that person,
she helps us,” you know?
And the word gets out that
we’re not nice people,
that’s not true.
– [Peter] Right.
– You know, we’re tired of
being taken advantage of
and something’s gotta give.
– Well that’s the
strategy, to shut you down,
if you are a compassionate person,
like you don’t want to be
called racist, homophobic.
– Right.
– Sexist,
any of these other words.
– And I’m not.
– Of course, but you
don’t have to defend that.
– No.
– The way it is, like,
those are the words used
because they’re the worst
things to be called, right?
And so it quiets people down,
they’re not used to being called that.
Now I’m online, I’ve
been called everything,
at this point, I don’t care
’cause they’re empty words.
I know I’m not those
things, so I don’t care.
– Well, I’ve been called-
– And then once you get over that,
but once you get over that hump.
– Yeah.
– Someone says, “Hey, you’re a neo-Nazi,”
I’m like, that’s the dumbest
thing, okay, whatever.
– Yeah.
– And I think a lot of people have to
get over that like uncomfortable moment,
and once you get over that, you realize,
oh, there’s sort of a lot of empty suits
behind that message and that mission.
And it’s only working through fear,
it’s not through dialogue,
it’s not through debate,
it’s not through.
– I’ve tried to have
quiet conversations with
some of these folks.
You can’t have a quiet conversation
with some of these folks.
– Of course.
– Okay?
It’s kind of like college kids.
10% of them will get drunk,
throw up on your lawn,
and they give the 90% the bad rap.
So it’s kind of sort of the same thing.
(car engine chugging)
– What happened to Boves?
Went downhill?
Okay, that is an old school,
from my recollection, Italian restaurant.
Don’t know how long it’s been like that.
Here we just have mattress
and couches, random things.
See a lot of these buildings
here with fences and walls,
and that’s just so
people don’t go use drugs
and hang out there.
Gonna go down to the police station,
which I don’t expect to be able to talk
to any police officers, but we’ll try,
let’s see what’s going on there.
(cars whooshing)
All right.
“The lobby is not staffed
and we will not know you are
here unless you call first.”
Yeah, may I speak with an officer please?
– [Operator] Okay, what is it regarding?
– It’s regarding the overall situation
with what’s going on
in the city right now.
I’m a video maker,
I work with all sorts of law
enforcement across the country
and I just wanna talk
with someone here at BVT.
(operator speaking indistinctly)
Yeah, you know,
they don’t have to say
anything on camera or anything,
but I would really love to.
I grew up here my first 18 years
and I’ve come back and I’ve
seen something quite different
and I’m doing my best to
support law enforcement.
– [Operator] Can I ask your name?
– Yeah, Peter Santenello.
(operator speaking indistinctly)
Okay, I’ll be here, thanks, bye.
(door clicking)
It’s like a ghost town in here.
No trophies or whatever was in there.
Authorized personnel.
Med return, no needles.
I wanna rip off a few
stats for you guys here.
Okay, so currently there are 68
or 69 police officers.
They’re allowed to have 87.
Pre 2020, there were 98 to 104.
So there’s a reduction.
And the reason there’s 68, 69
and don’t have 87 is,
from my understanding,
no one wants to sign up.
They’re having a hard
time with enrollment,
like many places.
If you’re from Burlington
in law enforcement,
let us know the exact
numbers, if I got that wrong,
I think I got that right.
Whoa, there you go,
Burlington Police Department.
Yeah, so that didn’t really work,
I got the call back and they’re like,
“Yeah, we’re really busy right now,”
and so that’s the case with
most police departments
to get them to speak on camera
is I’ve only had luck with
one, Glendale, Arizona.
Thank you, Glendale,
because you brought me in,
let me shoot how I shoot
and let me show your story, so.
It’s too bad because they have
a story and a perspective,
I’d love to get it.
Okay, so what’d you see,
the park across the street?
– Yeah, there was a younger guy over there
that apparently beat up some
woman with brass knuckles
and then stabbed another guy in the neck,
like, it was like random attacks,
people get drunk over there
all the time, do their drugs.
It’s a crazy, crazy scene over there.
It’s just, I don’t even know.
– [Peter] So things aren’t going well?
– No, the cops are doing
everything they can,
arresting them, whatever,
goes to the court system
and they throw it out.
Happens all the time,
that’s why it’s getting so bad out here
because the court system is messed up,
everybody’s just throwing
back out in the streets.
– They can only charge them
and then it’s up to the courts
for whether or not they’re gonna be able
to be prosecuted or get actually charged.
– Yeah.
– Everything gets dropped.
– Yeah, they’ll hold ’em for a day or two
and then they’re back on the street.
– [Peter] So how are the
locals feeling about this?
– They’re not liking it at all.
Everybody’s making sure
all their windows and doors
are locked at all times.
– [Peter] It’s not like the Burlington of-
– No.
– [Peter] Five years ago.
– Oh no.
– [Peter] What about the politicians?
Why do people keep voting
these people in if they?
– I have no clue.
– [Peter] Wow, what are
you knitting over there?
– Oh, I’m making a blanket
for his soon to be baby.
– [Peter] Oh, congrats,
how’s business for you?
– Business is pretty good,
sell a lot of beer. (laughs)
– [Peter] Okay, so this is City Market.
– [Security] A very popular grocery store.
– [Peter] Okay.
– It’s very small but a lot of traffic
– A day like today, what’s been going on?
– So we have shoplifting
and then also people trying to steal cars.
So multiple experiences today?
– Yeah, just one only when
someone tried to steal a car,
but then you’ll have like two
or three people shoplifting
and then some failed shoplifting.
– [Peter] Okay, so you
always have security here
in front of the grocery store?
– Yeah, and that’s, hello?
Oh sorry, they’re trying
to use the credit union.
Yeah, we’re around.
There’s a full-time security team.
– [Peter] Okay.
– And I work for Chocolate
Thunder Security,
so I’m like a substitute
teacher for security here.
I’m just helping out extra.
– [Peter] That’s crazy,
we need security in front of
a grocery store these days.
– Yeah, it’s not something that
would’ve been like a few years ago.
Like, I grew up in Burlington
and we didn’t have security
at the grocery store, yeah.
– [Peter] You think it’s
coming around at all?
– No.
– [Peter] Not at all?
– I don’t think so.
I think it’s kind of hit
rock bottom at this point.
I don’t really think it
could get worse, yeah.
(car engine rumbling)
– All right, guys, City Hall there again,
the very south side of Church Street.
Looks like they’re extending it perhaps,
and I have a little story for you here.
Back in the day, this
was called Club Toast,
and the scar on my lip,
I think I was 18 in there
and some guy was giving
this woman a hard time,
and I said, “Dude, leave her alone.”
And he’s like, “I’m from Ireland, lad,
just trying to have a good time.”
And he went away,
and then I got the sucker
punch from around the side.
I just remember hosing
everyone in that nightclub
on the dance floor with blood.
And when I went into the bathroom,
we were all cleaning my
blood off each other.
You know, memory lane, Club Toast.
Just got some intel on
an apartment building
going through all sorts of difficulties.
Let’s try to check that out.
All right, guys, this is the
tallest building in Vermont.
Yeah, I know, most people say,
“Wow, that’s not that tall.”
Vermont is a rural state.
– What’s up, Andrew?
– [Peter] How you doing sir? Okay.
– I wanna show you the
observatory before they use it.
– [Peter] Okay, okay, so.
– You guys getting on this
elevator or take the next one?
– We’ll wait, we don’t wanna overwhelm it.
– We’ll be only two minutes.
– If it gets stuck,
we’ll come save you.
– All right, Kathy, you’re
in charge of this building.
Is that the story?
– I am the head of our resident council,
but I’m just a resident
here, just like anybody else.
– Who’s living here?
– There’s 160 apartments.
– Okay.
– 150 of ’em are full right now.
They’re purposely keeping
some of the apartments open
because the ones that are
open were drug dealers
that were evicted and
they’re trying to give us
a little bit of time to
recover from all the activity
that was happening because of them.
– [Peter] Okay, so you’re
gonna bring us into that,
what’s been happening here?
– Right.
– [Peter] Okay.
– This is the observatory.
This is supposed to be open
for the residents to use.
But what this became,
when I first moved here
in December of 2022,
you couldn’t even come
up to this room at night
because it was full of homeless people,
drug dealers and drug users,
and they would lock the
door from the inside
and only let their clan of people in here.
– So how would they get in here,
past the front door and everything?
– Well, we have the key cards.
– Okay, okay.
– But they just surf in behind people
because of the bulk of
the population here,
62% are elderly, 62 and older.
– [Peter] Okay.
– And they just push their way by ’em.
I mean, if you’re a
30-year-old man, you know,
it’s not much of a difficult
to get in with a
70-year-old lady, you know?
And they will.
– [Peter] So you have a
lot of the elderly here?
– We have 62% of the building is elderly,
32% is people with disabilities,
who are younger than 62.
And then we have 8% of people
who are transitioning from prison.
We have had zero problem with anybody
who has ever transitioned
out of prison back into here.
– [Peter] Okay.
– They’re not an issue at all.
I wanted to show you this
because this was a place,
’cause there’s a bathroom there,
that the homeless people
will come in here,
they’ll shower, you know,
and so we’ve had to,
in the last six months,
this had to been locked.
So the residents don’t
have the use of this,
and this is supposed to
be for the residents.
So what we’ve done with Mike,
we’ve formed a resident council,
we’re kind of taking
control of the building
and we started a neighborhood watch.
– [Peter] Okay.
– And we’ve kind of not done much
with the neighborhood
watch, but by forming that,
what it did was it forced
Burlington Housing Authority
to get serious, and they
did put in guards here
and the guards roaming patrols at night,
and then now we have a guard
from 7:00 PM to 7:00 AM.
– [Peter] So things are
getting better here?
– Well, they’re better now
because it’s the summer
and you know, people are
all in the encampments
down there by the lake,
there’s three encampments
around Burlington-
– Right down there?
– [Kathy] With about 250, no,
they’d be right down there,
you see where the building
is with the green roof?
– [Peter] Okay, yep, yep.
– If you go just north of that,
all told, there’s about
250 homeless people
around Burlington that are
living outdoors right now.
Of those people, some of
them will go to the shelters,
but a large percentage of ’em,
like we had anywhere
between 50 and 80 a night.
– Okay.
– During the winter time,
living in our stairways,
shooting up drugs,
the ones that come here don’t
wanna go to the shelters
’cause they don’t wanna follow
the rules of the shelters.
They can’t use alcohol,
they can’t use drugs,
and then the other thing,
come on out, I’ll show you.
– But, yeah, we still have the
drugs and the thieves though,
as well as people, who were, basically,
we had a full thing had set up
where they knew one person to sell this,
one person sell that.
And they had a box truck
and everything to sell all this stuff.
– One of the attractions of this building
to the people who are using drugs
is every floor has free Narcan.
So they know that, if they overdose,
there’s Narcan here available.
And as residents, we oppose this,
but Burlington Housing,
in a humanitarian thing,
wants to have it here for ’em.
– [Peter] But you oppose it?
– We oppose it because it’s an attraction
to bring the drug users
into this building.
Here’s one of the trash rooms right here.
And on this trash room,
they will live in here,
and they lock this, they will
lock the door behind them.
So they go into the trash rooms at night,
they go into the laundry rooms
so they can shut the door and shoot up.
– So a lot of things have
come through my head today,
I’ve taken in a lot, learned a lot.
So the city runs this building?
– No, the city doesn’t run it.
So Burlington Housing Authority
is chartered by the city of
Burlington, they’re partners.
But the Burlington Housing Authority
does operate independently.
– Isn’t it their responsibility
to take care of all these problems?
– It is, they’re totally
unprepared for it.
They don’t know how to take of
the problem, quite honestly.
Under our lease and the handbook,
it says, “We are guaranteed the right
to peaceful enjoyment.”
We’re the elderly, I’m 68 years old.
Yeah, yeah, I spent 18 and a
half years in the Marine Corps-
– Oh wow.
– I shouldn’t be fighting drug dealers
when I’m 68 years old.
I should be having some
peaceful enjoyment in my life,
and Mike and I.
– Yeah.
– Spend the majority of our time,
you know, fighting drug dealers.
– I often spend eight hours a night,
basically, walking around, patrolling,
like, gathering information,
I’m out front quite often.
– [Peter] You fix stuff.
– Yes, I do lots of odd jobs.
– And you know things.
– Yeah.
– Okay, so what else
can we check out here?
– Yeah, let’s walk down
through the stairways.
Last year, the homeless people
as more and more came in,
at first, it would just be
the second and third floors
were the primary things.
And as more and more people came,
they moved all the way
here to the 11th floor.
One night, there was an extension cord
running out of this door,
plugged into that wall,
and they had one of those
electric fireplaces in the
stairway here to keep warm.
– Oh wow, oh my God.
– And these stairways,
although, they painted
some of them this summer
and cleaned them up,
these stairways would be
full of garbage, piss and,
needles.
– So did the city know about this?
– Oh absolutely.
– Okay.
– Every one of the city
counselors came here.
– Okay.
– And visited and toured.
You can see right now, I
mean, it really looks good.
– [Peter] Yeah.
– But if you look at the pictures
and we can give you other
pictures of the graffiti
that would be all over the walls,
this has all been repainted
because Burlington Housing
has done a good job
trying to get this cleaned up,
they brought in SERVPRO cleanup people,
they washed all these stairways down.
There was literally piss and
all over the walls in these stairways.
You could not walk,
you couldn’t walk down
and touch the railings
because you would get MRSA
or something like that.
And we had several cases
of MRSA in the building
from these people coming
in with open sores.
So we’re on the eighth floor right now
and this is one of the larger trash rooms.
So this is a room where
they would actually live.
– [Peter] How many?
– In the winter, sometimes many as three.
But they would come in here and shoot up
and they had to put cages
on all of the telecommunications equipment
’cause the people were coming in
and stealing the routers
just to sell ’em for so
they could get 20 bucks
for one hit of crack.
– So through your experience
and what you’ve seen,
do you feel like most
homeless are on drugs?
– No, no, I wouldn’t say that.
– Okay.
– I would say
what we’ve had is,
of probably the 70 or 80 people
we had on a nightly basis,
I would say half of them
were regular drug users.
– Half, okay.
– And probably a third of them would be
what we would categorize
as regular troublemakers.
– Okay.
– The same people over and over again.
Every other floor has laundry
in it for the residents.
What they were doing
all through the winter
is tearing off this part
of the washing machine,
they’d just rip it right
off or rip this door off
so they could get the quarters out
so they could rob the machines
and they would shoot up.
So every day, you would see
that you couldn’t come in here
because the machines were broken.
And then, we can give you pictures
of all the hot wiring the dryers,
so that they could have heat.
And this is on every other floor.
– [Peter] Is it free to
live here if you qualify?
– It’s not free,
but if you’re here with
financial assistance,
you pay only 30% of your income.
– Okay.
– [Mike] ‘Cause that’s when the coin ops.
– Oh yeah, that looks like fun.
– I’ve been all over the world
in the 18 years I was in the
Marines, and when I came here,
honestly, this is the most
dangerous place in the world
that I have ever been,
because as soon as we
formed a group of people
and started fighting back
to take the building back
away from these people, of
course, we got targeted.
And at the time, when I first
got here and the problems,
there were 11 drug
dealers in the building.
And we targeted them and
got with Burlington Housing
and Burlington Housing did a
good job working to evict them.
But it takes several months
to get people out to do that.
But it really put a
target on us to the point
where they made three
attempts at beating me up.
When it first happened, I said,
“Well, I better get
pepper spray.” (laughs)
And then, after the second time,
I said, “Well, I better get a stun gun.”
And then, after two
Philadelphia gang drug members
caught me in the elevator and said,
“We’re gonna shoot you
’cause you’re disrupting our business,”
I started carrying a pistol.
– [Peter] So you have a lot
of out of Vermont drug dealers
coming up here and?
– So the drugs that
come into this building
come from Springfield, Massachusetts,
Philadelphia, and New York City.
– [Peter] Okay, and they just know
Burlington’s a great market?
– They know it’s a good market.
And if you research, like, last fall,
there were eight murders in Vermont,
all drug related,
almost every one of those murders
was related to the Springfield,
Massachusetts drug gang.
So, Peter, this is our community room
where we hold dinners, monthly meetings,
and people can come in
here for recreation.
We now have locks on all the windows
and we have alarms on the doors.
– Okay.
– But the homeless people were coming in
and literally cutting the screens
and unlocking and climbing
in through the windows,
even after these doors are
locked at nine o’clock at night.
And then, they would set those doors
so that they looked like they were closed,
but they were just barely shut
so they could open them and
they weren’t actually locked.
So now there’s alarms on the doors.
– Right, oh yeah, you can see.
– [Mike] It’s somebody’s firsthand.
– [Peter] Yeah, literally, you
can see where the hands were.
– [Mike] Yeah, like I
said, this one as well,
like I said, you can
see where the hands were
when they tried to push it up.
– [Peter] Are they
still defacing the pool?
– Yes, I think cut it.
– Yeah.
– When I first got here, one of the things
that was a real problem for the residents
were homeless people were
just walking in the front door
and all of the packages from
the post office, FedEx, UPS,
were all being left on a table out front.
They would just literally walk in the door
and fill duffle bags and
take everything out of there.
The other thing that was happening,
they were coming in
here with shopping carts
full of stolen goods,
hundreds of dollars at a time,
and fencing it through residents
that lived in this building.
– [Peter] Oh.
– Who are now gone.
– [Peter] So the stuff
that’s getting stolen off Church Street
could come down here?
– Come here,
and they would fence it to someone
that was living in this
building who would then sell it,
and he’d give ’em the money,
they could buy their drugs,
and then he was reselling.
Some of them would just
resell it themselves,
they would go into that community room
and lay it out like it was
a flea market or something
and people would come
in and buy their stuff
at 25% of what the tag price was.
– [Peter] Geez.
– So what we did is we created a plan,
presented it to Burlington
Housing, they bought the cage.
But you can see the sign,
it’s completely run by the residents.
We come down every day,
UPS and FedEx, all of their
packages get locked up in here
and they’re very cooperative
with the program.
– [Peter] Okay.
– And we pass out the packages
every day to the residents,
and we’ve stopped most of the theft.
– [Peter] And you made
the paper, look at this.
(Kathy chuckles)
Fight for Decker Towers.
So how many drug dealers
do you think are in the building now?
– Six.
And then, the one that is maybe
the worst drug dealer in
the building right now,
beat the eviction because they do it
by trying to take away their subsidy
and making ’em fall behind on rent
’cause these are all
low level drug dealers,
it’s the people from
Philadelphia and Springfield,
New York City that are making the money.
– [Peter] Okay.
– And in fact-
– [Peter] These are their operatives.
– And in fact, right, there
was a major crack dealer
out in New York City who had
a meth lab on the fourth floor
and he was busted back in March or April.
And then the person whose
apartment he was using
is now in jail on federal drug charges.
Since those people have moved out,
they’ve taken advantage
of other drug users
and now have infiltrated into
some of their apartments.
I would say that we have three
drug dealers in the building,
but we have six apartments
that are suspected of drug activity,
running the drugs,
being the intermediaries for the people
coming from out of town into here.
So there’s still a lot
of drug activity here.
And that’s the other attraction
for these homeless people
that are using the drugs.
Again, they don’t wanna go to the shelters
where they have to follow
the rules, you know,
no drugs, no alcohol.
They can come here, use their
drugs, use their alcohol,
there’s a very vulnerable population.
We had three documented armed robberies
at gunpoint in our stairwells
last year and two rapes
of these people, you know?
– [Peter] Geez.
– So residents were at the
point where they’re afraid
to come out of their apartment
for fear of whatever’s
gonna happen to ’em.
– Ugh, that’s terrible.
So you have old retirees and-
– Right.
– You know, people not in
the prime of their youth
having to deal with all the crime
and they feel threatened here.
– Absolutely, and a lot
of the elderly people here
are not only elderly, but they also,
some of them have, you
know, mental disabilities
or vulnerabilities,
things, PTSD,
traumatic experiences from
other aspects of their life.
And so, it’s a very difficult
environment for them,
and that’s one of the things
that, when I came here,
I thought this was just gonna be
a temporary kind of
transition area for me.
– Right.
– And once I got here, I saw
the people that were here
and that they’re people who are vulnerable
and don’t really know how
to advocate for themselves
that are kind of beaten
down from so much of the,
well, for lack of a better
term, institutionalized.
– Mm-hm.
– Into this kind of public housing
and always being told, “You’re
a second class citizen.”
So what myself and Mike
and a group of other people
have tried to get the message to ’em,
“You’re not a second class citizen,
you can’t let people treat you
like a second class citizen,
start taking some pride in
your own home and yourself.”
And we’ve really kind of
turned the building around,
I think.
– Cool.
– We’ve made a lot of changes
and people are feeling
better about themselves
and people are willing to fight back.
This building was the drug
hub of Burlington, Vermont,
and we’re getting it turned around,
but we know winter’s coming
and they’re coming back.
So what we’re doing
right now, as residents,
we’re creating a plan, a security plan,
we’re going to present that to
Burlington Housing next week
and to the mayor’s office
and to the city counselors
and try to get everybody
together at the table
to talk about, use our plan as a baseline
to start talking about a real
plan to stop these people
so we don’t return to
what we had last year.
(footsteps tapping)
(intriguing music)
(people chattering)
– All right, guys,
full circle back to
beautiful Lake Champlain.
What an interesting day,
and I wanna thank all of those
who spoke up today on camera
because, for every one
of the people you saw,
there were many more that
had a strong opinion,
wanted to say something,
but were scared of the power button.
And my advice to you
would be, don’t be scared,
there are more people that feel that
this is not sustainable or
acceptable than you’d think.
Policies equal realities, and, yes,
this is a super complex
situation, there’s no easy fix.
But what currently exists
doesn’t work in the long run.
So I feel like Burlington’s
on sort of a knife’s edge,
it’s down pretty low right now.
It can either come around
with some of the momentum we saw today,
some of the compassioned citizens
that wanna make this place better,
or it could continue going down further.
That’s up to the people here, you know,
speaking up, what policies they vote for.
And in Vermont,
it’s always been a very
community-driven place,
and I feel there’s
nothing that this place,
as cheesy as that sounds, can’t overcome.
Dig into the policies,
dig into the people behind those policies,
dig into where the money comes from,
and usually, you’ll find
an interesting story.
All right guys, thanks for
coming along on that journey,
until the next one.
(cool music)