BRATTLEBORO-As Norma Hardy sits down to talk about her four-and-half-year tenure at the Brattleboro Police Department, it’s clear what’s top of mind for her.
The departing police chief points to a 2-inch-thick stack of paper — printouts of department emails and texts — that she will provide for a public records request from someone in Massachusetts.
“I don’t know what they’re going to do with it. They’re probably going to try to use it for the same purposes,” she says, referring to a records request in 2025 that resulted in coverage in the alternative news site, The Rake Vermont.
The post generally portrayed the department as being too close to a controversial social media personality known as “Planet Hank.” It also specifically accused her of deliberately redacting an email.
Hardy believes her efforts to be transparent and accessible backfired and that she was unfairly accused.
“They took only certain texts and put them in the article, making it seem like he [Poitras] had this unholy access to me,” she says. “I gave everybody access to me. My reputation has been untarnished for 34 years.”
While an internal town review of the accusations against Hardy revealed only an “unintentional error” in addressing the public records request, the controversy — and a series of public records requests that followed — have taken a toll on her and her family.
“All of this was started out of hating of Hank, and I’m collateral damage,” she says. “I’m just tired.”
From low morale to ‘a destination for officers’
A very different picture of Chief Hardy is painted by a number of people who worked with her, were policed by her department, and interacted with her every day.
“She’s been a fantastic leader for the department during the time she’s been here,” says Jeremy Evans, currently assistant police chief and soon to be Hardy’s successor. “She literally was the person we needed at the time.”
“We were in such a poor position, just like everywhere else in the country, probably, but definitely in the state, with low morale and with staffing levels,” Evans recalls. “We were at, like, 50% staffing.”
Hardy came to Brattleboro in 2021 after a long career with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, with experience both in big-city facilities and smaller New Jersey towns.
She arrived at a moment of deep strain around the country between police and community members after the murder of George Floyd, a Black man, in Minneapolis by a white police officer in 2020.
Nationally, protests over police violence were ongoing. Locally, Brattleboro was still grappling with questions about racial bias in traffic stops and with residents’ stories of negative encounters with police.
It was also the tail end of the COVID-19 pandemic, when departments across the country struggled to hang on to officers, let alone recruit new ones.
Adam Petlock, a longtime member of the department who rose through the ranks and will now serve as assistant chief, remembers that context clearly.
“She came during a difficult time where you had all the anti-police rhetoric that was going on,” he says. “It was hard to retain employees.”
From the moment Hardy first came to the department as a finalist candidate, Evans says, the department sensed something different.
“There were multiple candidates,” he says. “When she came through and met people, it was like an instantaneous [connection]. We were all hoping that she would be the one who got hired.”
For officers, the first signs of change were in how she treated her own people.
Asked about a typical day at the office under Hardy, Petlock says: “She’s always amongst the people. She’s not just in her office typing. She does that stuff, but she’s also out talking to the officers, always asking them how they’re doing, how their families are.”
He remembers one officer who was clearly shaken after having to use a Taser on a call.
After the incident, Hardy sat in the cruiser with the officer for a while, “just talking to them, asking them how they’re doing and making sure that they had access to resources and social workers,” Petlock says. “It’s stuff like that that she notices that not all leaders would.”
Evans says her “ability to engage with anyone” has been central.
“She truly has a gift,” he says. “That’s a really hard ask, to come into a police department and connect with everyone.”
Under Hardy, the department went from barely half-staffed to a full staff of 30, in an era when police departments as large as Burlington’s have struggled to fill their ranks.
Evans and Petlock credit this staffing success to the culture Hardy created.
“We kind of created an environment where Brattleboro is starting to become a destination for officers again, because of her leadership,” Petlock says. “People want to come to a place where there’s like a family environment, where you’re treated well, from the leadership down.”
‘The little things’ and human-scale policing
If internal reforms reshaped the department’s culture, Hardy’s innovation that’s most visible to the public might be the creation of the BRAT (Brattleboro Resource Assistance Team) program — a downtown-focused unit that blends law enforcement with social services.
Hardy says the idea grew out of a period of relentless downtown burglaries, break-ins, and fights. Short-staffed officers were constantly pulled from serious calls around town to take reports or respond to disturbances that weren’t life-threatening.
“We were having all the stores getting broken into, money taken, cash registers taken,” Hardy recalls. “We were responding to those calls constantly.”
Her solution: a dedicated, unarmed downtown team to maintain a visible presence, respond quickly to businesses, and handle many of those calls, freeing high-level officers to focus on higher-risk incidents across Brattleboro.
Hardy speaks of public safety rather than policing and emphasizes human contact and trust-building. She and her officers visit schools, eat lunch with first-graders, read at story time, and greet parents at drop-off. She encourages officers to walk people to their cars if they feel unsafe and to be recognizable, approachable faces in neighborhoods.
“Giving somebody a walk to their car shouldn’t be something that you need to be taught,” she says. “It should just be a human interaction that you would have with someone who doesn’t feel safe.”
“I think the police are much more community-oriented than they were when we first moved here,” says Maya Hasegawa, a 12-year Brattleboro resident. “You can worry about crime and all that, but it’s some of the little things [that police do], when people feel harassed on the street or whatever, that make a difference to a town.”
For Jane Wheeler, a Brattleboro resident who grew up in town, the difference is clear.
She remembers Selectboard meetings where downtown business owners and nonprofits like the Boys & Girls Club and the New England Youth Theatre repeatedly asked for help with public disorder downtown.
“The only thing that made a difference was when Chief Hardy and the crew got involved, made the downtown action plan, created the BRAT team, and things improved,” Wheeler says.
Blending deep compassion with stronger accountability
“When Chief Hardy first came to Brattleboro, I was struck by her immediate understanding of the challenges Brattleboro was facing,” writes Elizabeth Bridgewater, executive director of the Windham & Windsor Housing Trust, which owns and manages affordable housing properties in southern Vermont, in an email to The Commons.
“As her vision unfolded, it was exciting to see that it included a blend of deep compassion for those struggling and a stronger framework of accountability for those engaged in criminal activity,” she continues.
Bridgewater says Hardy “strengthened partnerships that expanded the number of clinical social workers embedded within the police department and hired people with lived experience to work hand in hand with officers to help people access treatment options.”
On Housing Trust properties, police officers and BRAT members walk properties with staff, brainstorming how to increase safety, and they routinely attend tenant meetings.
“Chief Hardy made herself and other leaders within the department available to the community in refreshing ways,” Bridgewater says. “One member of the BRAT team is now stopping by a regularly scheduled game night at one downtown property to continue strengthening those relationships. Residents have responded positively to this.”
For Peter “Fish” Case, a Brattleboro Selectboard member and owner of Burrows Sports downtown, BRAT has been especially important in how the town responds to visible mental-health crises.
“We have a long way to go, but we also have help that is constantly on the street,” he says. “Mental illness is not illegal, right? And if somebody is in distress and doesn’t know how to get help, we now have the BRAT team who can help them get the resources that they need.”
The model has drawn attention from beyond Brattleboro.
“Other communities have called, wanting to talk to Chief Hardy about how to implement that sort of thing,” Case says. BRAT has been received widely and positively, and that’s all [her] doing.”
At the same time, Wheeler worries that the very programs residents now praise could be endangered by budget pressures and political debates.
“Some on the Selectboard want to whittle away at the police department overall,” she says. “I’m not sure where cuts would be made, but they need to leave it [BRAT] alone, because that’s what’s working.”
What comes next?
As Hardy prepares to leave, Evans says the department aims to build on her approach while acknowledging the financial pressures facing the town.
“We want to keep doing what we’re doing and do it better — more effectively, more efficiently — to make all the work we’re doing in public safety as good and useful as possible,” he says.
For Petlock, the answer lies in carrying forward the spirit of Hardy’s leadership.
He says he wants to emulate “the concern and caring that she has — not just for the department, but for the community.”
“It tells you that she really does care about what she’s doing. It’s not just a job,” he says.
“We will feel her loss,” Case says. “Although I have the utmost confidence in the incoming chief, [...] the impact that Chief Hardy has had on this community has really just been impressive.”
This News item by Ellen Pratt was written for The Commons.