Is that a police officer coming to the door? In Burlington on Monday, the officer might just be delivering an Amazon package. Denis Charlet/AFP/Getty Images/File/AFP/Getty Images

For a brief time on Monday, police in Burlington played the role of Amazon delivery workers.

After dozens of unopened packages were found stuffed in the dumpster at the town’s Chestnut Hill Cemetery, officers took it upon themselves to deliver the packages to residents rather than keep them at the station or wait for an Amazon employee to collect them.

According to a tweet from the department’s account, “a diligent grounds keeper” at the cemetery found the packages Monday morning inside a garbage disposal bin, a discovery police called suspicious.

Police said they are investigating the incident, to “see how they wound up there.” The department has also notified Amazon about what happened but has yet to hear back, an official said.

Until they crack the case, however, officers were deployed to the neighborhood where the packages were meant to go, and dropped them off at the appropriate homes.

“To ensure that everyone gets their merchandise in a timely fashion (and without too much red tape!) we are delivering the packages to the proper addresses,” police tweeted Monday. “If you see an officer delivering your packages say hello!”

Burlington Police Lieutenant Glen Mills, who sent out the pair of tweets about the packages, said in a telephone interview that finding unopened packages in a trash receptacle was unusual. Typically, he said, people who steal Amazon boxes from people’s front steps will remove the items inside before discarding the evidence.

“People who steal packages open them right away because they want to see what they’ve got,” he said. “To have that large of a number of packages — it’s just very risky. It just didn’t make any sense. It’s just very unusual.”

Mills said the department is trying to get more information from Amazon, to figure out if the packages were stolen or if they were just dumped in the trash by a delivery person.

He said police decided to take on the task of getting the packages to people’s homes because they “weren’t so busy with other calls.”

The department could have brought the items — there were about 30 to 40 total, he guessed — back to the station and then alerted residents and waited for them to come and collect their respective goods. But skipping those steps made more sense.

“It’s the right thing to do,” he said. “We will have a lot of stolen package reports coming in if we don’t deliver them to them ...We figured we’d be more proactive.”