Vermont State Police Crime Unit Making Waves

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Created on Friday, 18 March 2016 16:08
Written by Alex Pinkham

VTPoliceAround the Northeast Kingdom- With two high profile murder cases in the Northeast Kingdom, the Vermont State Police now have a department in charge of handing these kinds of cases. The group is called the Major Crimes Unit.

The team is made up of 9 Troopers who work to solve homicide, and shooting cases involving the police. They also work on unsolved cases.

 "What we did about a year ago was to form a major crimes unit, which was a dedicated unit of detectives that would take on all the homicides the VSP got involved with, assisted other agencies with, and also be the primary investigators on officer involved shootings," explained Captain J.P. Sinclair, Chief Criminal Investigator for the Major Crimes Unit.

According to Captain Sinclair, creating this unit was difficult due to sparse amount of funding. The group is made up of detectives form all across the Green Mountain State. This is instead of hiring brand new people and offering them jobs in the MCU.

"We didn't receive any additional personnel or funding or anything like that," said Captain Sinclair. "What we did was we took within our own division, detectives from different troops and commanders to form this unit. For lack of a better ways to say it, we robbed Peter to pay Paul to put this unit together."

They look into solving older cases that have been left behind by other agencies. They are trying to unsolved murders and cases were a body was never found.

According to Captain Sinclair, there are still other cases where the victim's skeleton is all that remains, so a case of death is harder to determine. All these old cases have made the unit look at how all of these crimes are classified. The old cases also need to be viewed in a new light according to Captain Sinclair.

"The department is going to make an announcement about revamping of our website. Along with that we are going to have an interactive map system of missing persons and unsolved homicides that the public can go on to," said Sinclair. "There will be a map of the State of Vermont with icons throughout the state that show you where all these unsolved homicides are. You can click on each one and it will bring up the date, the victims name, and just a little bit about what that case was."

According Captain Sinclair, the hope is to make the police department more transparent and form a strong reputation with the people in the state. Over the past year, the unit has helped accelerate the Vermont State Police's ability solve these crimes.