Ah yes, the golden days of the early ’20s, when hordes of left-wingers took over the streets of St. Johnsbury and the town’s progressive leadership responded by cutting the police department’s budget.

Oh wait, you say that didn’t happen?

Well, then explain this.

The briefly (and marginally) successful “defund the police” movement in Burlington is being blamed — several years later — for the Queen City’s struggle to fight crime, substance use, vandalism, and fears about public safety. And yet, according to VTDigger’s Kingdom correspondent K. Fiegenbaum, the town of St. Johnsbury is suffering from exactly the same suite of problems.

As are most or all of Vermont’s other cities and towns, from Rutland to Bennington to Brattleboro to St. Albans to Montpelier and beyond.

It’s almost as if the root causes lay beyond a certain city’s brief dalliance with trimming police budgets. It’s almost as if the problems are systemic, statewide, beyond the capacity of any local or county official to control. Even when, as in St. J, St. A, and Rutland, those officials are predominantly Republican and not at all “woke.”

Fiegenbaum’s piece is eerily riddled with echoes of Burlington. The epicenter of a surge in “bad behavior” is a park adjacent to city offices. Problems in the park include “open alcohol consumption, violence, [and] overdoses.” Police are overrun with repeat offenses by a small number of people who are “arrested, charged with a misdemeanor, potentially held overnight and then released back into the community” where they reoffend.

Gee, I must have missed the thing about the Caledonia County prosecutor adopting Chittenden State’s Attorney Sarah Fair George’s policy of refusing to impose cash bail. Or maybe George’s progressive justice policies aren’t… GASP, shudder… the real problem???

(By the way, the Caledonia County State’s Attorney was appointed by Gov. Phil Scott.)

There’s more:

The surge corresponds with cutbacks to the state’s motel voucher program, which has served as an overflow system for the typically full traditional homeless shelters, as well as the cleanup of several local homeless encampments on nearby private property.

Side note about encampment cleanups. A couple years ago, ProPublica reported on the devastating, inhumane toll those cleanups (such a bland, inoffensive term) impose on our most vulnerable residents. It’s shameful, and should not be forgotten when local bigwigs decide it’s time to sweep the problem under the rug.

And before somebody starts blathering in the Comments about shiftlessness, vagrancy, and substance abuse, well, the root cause of homelessness is a shortage of housing. Most homeless people desperately want to achieve stability in their lives. The best first step in that process is providing them with reliable shelter. Many are homeless despite being employed; they just don’t make enough to afford housing when it’s in short supply. So shut the hell up about how the homeless are to blame for their plight. And before anyone blurts out that bromide about pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, well, that phrase was originally meant as sarcasm, referring to a task that cannot physically be done.

Putting a bow on our main story, Town Manager Chad Whitehead, in Fiegenbaum’s rephrasing, “said numerous other Vermont communities’ police logs look just like his town’s.”

Huh. What do you know. It’s not just Burlington. It’s not just communities with progressive mayors or prosecutors. It’s the same damn thing in community after community across Vermont.

Gosh. Do you think maybe we should take a closer look at state government’s role in all of this, and how its failure to address the root causes has imposed financial and social burdens on our cities and towns?

You’ll get no argument from me.