The towns of Bennington and Hancock are currently looking into merging police departments in hopes of saving some money. Both departments are also currently facing staff vacancies – a challenge when there are just five full-time officer positions budgeted between the two departments. Recruiting and keeping officers is a perennial difficulty in the Monadnock region, and it’s getting worse, police chiefs said. Although funds are at the heart of Hancock and Bennington’s discussion, are there other potential benefits to merging? The Ledger-Transcript asked local police chiefs for their perspectives on recruitment and mergers.
“To say it has been difficult to attract new officers would be an understatement,” Dublin Police Chief Tim Suokko said. Months, sometimes years, go by without filling vacant positions, he said. “It seems like there is a constant cycle of departments being short-staffed, finally getting up to full-staffing only to have an officer leave for another agency (usually larger agencies with higher pay, better benefits, more opportunity for advancement, etc.) and the cycle starts again,” Suokko said.
“When the economy is good, nobody wants to be a cop,” Temple-Greenville Chief Jim McTague said. “When the economy goes bad, then people are more looking towards civil service jobs and so forth.”
The recent uptick in protests against police practices and movements to defund or abolish police departments are is just another factor in what was already a substantial list of reasons, McTague said.
When there are riots on TV and calls for defunding police, “Who wants to get involved with that?” he said. Even outside of public sentiment towards officers, it’s a job that demands work on weekends, holidays, night and day shifts, and it can be stressful, Greenfield Chief Brian Giammarino said. Plus, police departments can’t take just anyone. Nowadays, many applicants don’t pass the physical, Francestown Chief Michael Dowd said, and there’s an extensive background check to pass.
“With the officer candidate pool shrinking and the affordable housing market in and around Dublin on the decline, it is getting harder and harder to find people who either already live in the area or who are able to afford to move to the area,” Suokko said. Dublin is one of several local towns that uses on-call officers to fill certain coverage hours, he said, so officers must live close by. For the past decade, Dublin’s been able to employ officers from Dublin or adjacent towns. “We currently have officers who live as far away as Manchester,” Peterborough Chief Scott Guinard said, describing a “challenge” in finding enough officers to fill the roster and also having them live close by. Peterborough, Rindge, and Antrim police chiefs echoed the difficulty of finding officers who can live nearby.
“It’s expensive to hire a new officer,” McTague said. Departments sometimes have to wait months before a new officer can attend the police academy, Dowd said. There are further costs involved with the period between a recruit’s completion of the academy and getting out on the road alone, Anair said.
Retaining new hires is another perennial difficulty. Not only do officers get worn out in a perpetually understaffed department, but they can also easily get higher paying jobs in other departments once certified, Anair said. Some departments offer $10,000 hiring bonuses, McTague said. Rindge has lost three officers in three years to neighboring Jaffrey, which can offer $1,000 or more beyond Rindge’s monthly pay. ‘That’s hard to compete with,” Anair said.
“It’s one of the pitfalls of being Chief for a small community,” Dowd said. There’s a full understanding that new officers will “graduate” to a larger police department once they gain experience, he said.
“It has not been ideal, but I feel we have been able to provide coverage and services to the town in a way that citizens have not felt or been impacted by the department being short-staffed,” Suokko said.
With staffing and funding as perpetual issues, what if more departments merged, the way Temple and Greenville departments merged in 2005?
There’s a lot to consider before making a move like that, local police chiefs said, but all who were interviewed believed the merged Temple-Greenville department seemed to be an effective partnership.
It would be important to make sure citizens of all involved towns feel as though police time is fairly allocated between the communities, Lyndeborough Chief Rance Deware said. “The biggest part of community policing is being seen, stopping and talking to people when you see them on the side of the road,” he said, and residents might not like it if police only came to their town when responding to a call, he said.
Local pride and a sense of ownership is a really big factor, McTague said. There’s a significant difference between merging departments versus having one town provide services for another, he said. Who does a resident complain to if they don’t like the service another town’s police department is providing? he asked. McTague wanted both Temple and Greenville police departments to both disband before creating a new department, “so if a citizen saw a cruiser in town, they’d say that’s my cruiser, that’s my officer,” he said. They went so far as to merge Temple’s and Greenville’s police patches, he said.
Merging police departments is a lot like taking on a roommate, McTague said, in that the decision can’t just be about saving money. Temple and Greenville were a good partnership partly due to geography, McTague said. Temple is about 23 square miles, and Greenville is about seven. It would be harder to manage had Temple merged with, say, Lyndeborough, which has much more land. “It has to really fit,” he said. “Both towns got better coverage,” in the existing arrangement, he said.
“It should be explored,” Giammarino said of merged departments, and said he saw the opportunity for “significant” savings, if not immediately, than years down the line. A merged department would need the same numbers of people and cars, he said, but coverage could improve. A merged department could switch to 24/7 coverage and eliminate on-call hours, he said. Now-retired Antrim Chief Scott Lester expressed similarly cautious optimism. “I think it’s a valuable discussion,” he said. There could be conflicts, however, if the constituent towns had different expectations for spending or service, he said.
How is merging departments different than mutual aid agreements? All Hillsborough County law enforcement agencies have a signed mutual aid agreement through the county attorney’s office, Guinard said, and others like Peterborough have additional mutual aid contracts with individual towns out-of-county. Mutual aid contracts carry no obligations, Dowd said. They’re treated more as requests to cover a neighboring town if a department is already providing adequately for their own town, he said. “Of course,” Dowd said he responds when a neighboring town needs coverage while an officer is appearing in court.
Police chiefs have to use discretion with mutual aid contracts, McTague said, because a lot of times, the agreements wind up flowing in a one-way direction. Temple-Greenville is very strict about when they agree to respond to a mutual aid request if there’s only one officer on duty, since they’re leaving two towns without an officer in that situation, he said.