In early August, Michael Henry quietly resigned from the Burlington Police Department after a 24-year career in law enforcement. He was a lieutenant, a supervisor who earned an annual salary of $137,087. But Henry left under a cloud. His conduct at crime scenes had harmed efforts to prosecute at least two high-profile cases, including a murder, according to Chittenden County State’s Attorney Sarah George. He’d been the subject of at least five internal investigations, and George was so worried about his credibility and competency that she issued a formal notice of concern, known as a “Brady letter,” indicating she wouldn’t use his testimony in court. She said in correspondence to a ranking police official that she had raised issues about him to the department for years. Internal probes, some sparked by his own colleagues, revealed that Henry was spending too much time in the police department’s break room, including as much as eight hours during one shift earlier this year. He was also accused of confronting a subordinate over statements she made to investigators about him. And Henry collected more than $50,000 in unearned overtime pay from April 2025 through March 2026 due to a payroll error. He paid most of it back before he left the department. With fewer officers on staff, police have been among Burlington’s top overtime earners in recent years. But the fact that Henry was paid so much money he hadn’t earned without anyone noticing raises questions about how well the city is monitoring its dollars and cents at a time when its finances are in distress. While Henry was one of the city’s top-paid employees, the overpayment only came to light because he brought it to the attention of a superior officer, according to investigators. Both Henry’s resignation and the Brady letter were reported last month by Vermont News First. Henry declined to be interviewed for this story. Michael Henry Credit: Courtesy of WCAX-TV As a result of the overtime error, Mayor Emma Mulvaney-Stanak has directed the Department of Finance and Administration to begin a “comprehensive review of the city’s payroll process,” she said. The city is bringing in an outside contractor to audit the finance department’s current policies and practices. Mulvaney-Stanak, a Progressive, said she was “deeply disappointed” by Henry’s conduct. But she applauded interim Police Chief Shawn Burke for his “swift action” and for taking concerns about Henry’s behavior seriously. Henry resigned before a disciplinary decision could be handed down, according to Burke. The mayor declined to answer whether Henry’s situation indicates a need for greater outside oversight of the police. She only said her administration would prioritize “excellence, trustworthiness, and accountability” in its ongoing efforts to replenish the police department’s ranks. In response to a public records request from Seven Days, the Burlington Police Department released partially redacted copies of the internal investigations into Henry. In a series of conversations and emails with then-deputy chief Brian LaBarge — who investigated Henry — George said she had raised concerns about Henry’s competency as far back as 2023. (LaBarge is now the Williston police chief.) That summer, Henry was among the first on the scene when a young woman, Kelley Cusson, was found dead in a playground on South Champlain Street; police determined she had been the victim of a homicide. Henry made inappropriate and disparaging comments about the position of her body, George told LaBarge. His remarks were redacted from the documents released by police. The lieutenant initially speculated that Cusson had died of a drug overdose, despite obvious signs that she had been strangled, George added. George told LaBarge that the defense attorneys in the Cusson case had planned to call an expert who would testify that Cusson died of a drug overdose. She feared cross-examining Henry would have meant “calling into question his investigative skill and lack of common sense.” The State’s Attorney’s Office ultimately entered a plea deal with Cusson’s killer, Claude Mumbere, that included a 14-year sentence for second-degree murder. George said Henry’s actions were concerning but did not directly lead to the plea deal. “Never put Mike Henry on the stand unless you absolutely have to,” a deputy attorney in George’s office told her, she wrote. George claimed to have brought her concerns about Henry to former police chief Jon Murad but said they went “unaddressed.” LaBarge looked but could not find any emails from George to Murad about Henry. LaBarge ultimately concluded that, based on George’s complaints, Henry’s comments at the Cusson murder scene were “improper, lacking decency, and defamatory to the victim and could have undermined the effectiveness of the State’s prosecution and ultimately caused a ‘public relations’ crisis for the department.” He recommended additional training for the lieutenant. In her Brady letter, George alleges that Henry committed “multiple policy violations” that negatively impacted a separate case involving a car thief who drove up on a sidewalk last September and struck a woman, leaving her paralyzed. Records from this incident were withheld from Seven Days. Murad, who is now the commissioner of the Vermont Department of Corrections, declined to comment. Earlier this year, Henry was notified that he was the subject of an internal investigation for reasons that have not been publicly disclosed. He began spending his shifts loitering in the police station break room, “sitting with a foot up on the table, no vest on, watching TV,” according to an unidentified officer’s complaint. LaBarge reviewed footage from the station and found that Henry spent 61 cumulative hours in the break room across 11 shifts. Some nights he spent as little as two hours there; one night, in early February, he relaxed for more than eight hours.  When confronted, Henry admitted it “wasn’t a good look” and he “wasn’t being a good role model.” In April, another officer told LaBarge that he had witnessed Henry interrogating an officer over testimony she had given in an internal investigation involving the lieutenant. The documents do not specify the nature of the investigation. After reviewing witness accounts and camera footage, LaBarge found that Henry had violated department regulations and created an “unprofessional environment” at the police station. Henry claimed he had not meant to intimidate the officer, but LaBarge determined the lieutenant’s actions were “extremely unprofessional and an inappropriate display of poor judgement, as well as an abuse of his position and authority which also undermined the integrity of the internal investigation and disciplinary process.” Then, in late March, Henry told a deputy chief that he believed he had been mistakenly overpaid by the city, initially estimating the overpayment to be more than $20,000. The subsequent investigation found that Henry had been overpaid by more than $50,000. The city changed its payroll software in April 2025, and the transition had been “a mess,” LaBarge wrote in an email at the time. Other officers were overpaid as well, though they spotted the error and had it corrected immediately. Henry’s earnings were erroneously inflated for about a year, until March 2026. To have actually earned the amount of money he received, Henry would have had to work an average of 54 hours of overtime in each 80-hour pay period.  When confronted, Henry told LaBarge that he would “never, ever, intentionally or knowingly take money” that was not his and would “never commit fraud.” He said he had not been closely monitoring his paychecks. But LaBarge found that Henry often communicated with city staff “regarding payroll and timekeeping issues, including matters involving his own pay.” Emails between Henry and the city’s human resources department inquiring into the details of his time cards were included in the internal investigation. “Whether viewed as intentional misconduct or an extraordinary failure to exercise reasonable care,” LaBarge wrote in his internal investigation memo, Henry’s actions reflected either “dishonesty regarding his claimed lack of knowledge or a level of incompetence and irresponsibility inconsistent with the expectations of his rank, position, or that of a Burlington police officer.” Henry paid the city back $41,191, the amount the city determined he owed after tax withholdings. It’s common practice for police to rake in overtime. The department’s ongoing staffing issues and the demand for additional officers at special events allow for plenty of opportunities to work extra hours, according to Burke. The top 10 overtime earners in 2025 were police officers, city records show. Collectively, city employees earned $4.8 million in overtime last year; $1.3 million of that went to the police department. The top 10 overtime earners last year were police officers, city records show. Henry was the highest-paid employee in the city last year, earning $223,480 — but the funds he paid back stripped him of that distinction. In 2024, Henry was the city’s second-highest-paid employee, with $71,045 of overtime pay. Henry’s overtime earnings prior to 2025 were not part of the investigation. While the city has searched high and low for ways to balance its budget, including through layoffs, the police department has been untouched. In fact, the city has funneled even more money to cops. Mulvaney-Stanak successfully lobbied for a five-cent tax increase that voters approved on Town Meeting Day in March that allowed the city to budget for 10 additional officers, along with sign-on bonuses and other perks intended to court new recruits. The size of the department has shrunk from 92 cops in June 2020 to 55 as of August. Both Mulvaney-Stanak and Burke framed Henry’s overtime overpayment as a “payroll error” and not financial fraud. The situation involving the former lieutenant has surfaced after years of calls for Burlington to increase oversight of officers, stemming from a rash of excessive-force complaints in 2019. One proposal would have created a community control board to mete out punishment directly; another gave more disciplinary power to the civilian police commission. The former proposal, opposed by city Democrats, Murad and the police union, failed on Town Meeting Day 2023. The following year, voters approved a  charter change to give the police commission greater oversight authority. The measure would allow the commission to convene an independent panel if a majority of its members disagreed with how the chief had disciplined a police officer. Like some other such measures supported by Burlington voters, however, it’s languishing in the state legislature, which must authorize charter changes. Mulvaney-Stanak said she still supports the change and called for lawmakers to take it up. As it stands now, members of the council-appointed police commission are only allowed to advise department brass on matters that include some disciplinary actions. Police Commission Chair Michaela Finneran said the commission did not play a role in Henry’s resignation but “fulfilled its role in the disciplinary process.” Former police commissioner Stephanie Seguino, a staunch advocate for civilian oversight, said the situation further proves that Burlington police are unable to police themselves. Kason Hudman, director of operations of the Peace Justice Center, agreed. His nonprofit has long advocated for progressive issues, including criminal justice system reform. “The police union is really powerful and can advocate for the police,” he said. “But we as the people, who ultimately pay their salary, don’t have a strong civilian oversight board or anything to say, ‘You’re getting paid six figures; we expect a certain level of behavior — and certainly fiscal responsibility.’” As a high-ranking officer, Henry was not a member of the Burlington Police Officers’ Association, the union that represents rank-and-file cops. But in a statement, the union said it believed the “established internal investigation process was appropriately followed” in Henry’s case. The union warned that further attempts to exert civilian oversight would have a “negative impact on employee retention and morale within the department and may adversely affect the department’s ability to recruit qualified personnel.” The city has not yet chosen an auditor to analyze Burlington’s payroll, and it’s unclear what that will cost. Mulvaney-Stanak has pledged that her administration will “examine and improve current policies and internal controls to prevent this from happening again.” As it stands, Burlington taxpayers will continue to pay Henry, regardless of the allegations. At 51, he is eligible to receive the full pension and retirement benefits guaranteed to Burlington’s long-serving police officers for the rest of his life. ➆ The original print version of this article was headlined “Cashing Out | A Burlington police lieutenant resigned after a series of investigations, including into his overtime pay” The post Burlington Lieutenant Was Under Investigation When He Resigned appeared first on Seven Days. ...read more read less