By David Brensilver
Published on 8/20/2004
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East Lyme - East Lyme needs a new facility for its police department. This has been said countless times of late, especially given all the talk about Wayne Fraser's erstwhile proposal to build a public safety complex in conjunction with the National Guard at Camp Rell.
What makes the current station so inadequate?
Last week, Resident State Trooper Sergeant Michael Collins gave a reporter and photographer a thorough tour of the police station.
It is a structure that was built in 1927 and served originally as the Town Hall. Seventy-seven years later, a place once deemed unfit for eight employees now houses a pair of resident troopers, five part-time officers, 20 full-time officers and one civilian employee.
Collins pointed out that the report room, which can accommodate three officers filling out reports at any given time, should accommodate twice that many.
Beyond the space limits of that space, Collins pointed out water damage and mold. He also pointed at an air conditioner that was too small for the window it rested in, a physical theme that would repeat itself several times, a physical theme that indicated in part, the station's physical insecurity.
There has never been a break-in, Collins said. To prevent that, officers on the night shift patrol their own facility with regularity. The building is not alarmed and is void of personnel once receptionist Elizabeth Murphy has left for the day.
Collins repeated the lament that taxpayers don't have access to the station 24 hours a day.
"The building itself has become something we have to monitor," Collins said. "It's an absolute waste of time."
The front entrance, for example, has an old wooden door armed with one bolt lock. Bricks are falling out of the front staircase, which is littered with paint chips. The front door is no longer used as behind it reside three vacuum cleaners, officer mailboxes, an old computer, road flares, seized license plates and a garbage can.
"We use it for a storage are because we don't have anywhere else to store the cleaning equipment," Collins said.
East Lyme DARE Officer Jean Cavanaugh's office also doubles as a storeroom wherein records are kept, as well as all police-related forms, laser and radar sets, vendor permits and records such as those documenting firearm sales and old domestic abuse reports.
Pairs of boots, coats, extension cords and even an old sea-foam-green suitcase further cluttered the space, as did an ancient IBM Wheelwriter 1000 and an outdated printer.
"It's an office, but it's used mainly as a storeroom," Collins said.
Collins said that about a month ago, the floor in the foyer was rotting. A carpenter was brought in, one who refused to do the necessary work until the asbestos was removed from the area, Collins said.
Collins said that an outside contractor removed the asbestos.
He pointed to the sign on the actual front door of the station upon which a posted sign hangs: "Station not manned 24-hours a day."
"That sign says it all," Collins said.
The interview room also houses the National Crime Information Center computer, as well as the one that posts Amber Alerts.
"These two things are supposed to be in a room by themselves," Collins said, referring implicitly to the sensitive nature of the information they provide.
He showed a reporter and photographer that there were 38 unread Amber Alert messages. Nobody mans that station.
"This should be a dispatcher's job," Collins said. He said those computers ought to be manned 24 hours a day.
Officer Mike Macek popped his head in to say that interview subjects shouldn't see what's on the NCIC or Amber Alert computers.
"We have no other choice but to allow civilians to come in here," Macek said.
Collins' office boasts a generator stuffed into a non-functioning fireplace, a window that's propped open with a slab of wood and a pile of sensitive files, including a Homeland Security file, that are kept on a green leather chair for lack of storage area.
The stairwell to the veritable bowels of the place is narrow.
"This is why you have people coming and going from the department constantly," Collins said, going on to say the "place is a dump."
He pointed to an unlocked, dirt-floored crawl space along the stairwell.
In the building's basement, a former storage room has been converted into the women's locker room, though it remains, as does nearly every room in the place, a storage area.
Prior to that, the department's two female officers were relegated to the sole, unisex bathroom.
Even with the new digs, DARE officer Cavanaugh said, "I don't dress here. I put on my uniform at home."
Whereas the bathroom stench was one complaint Collins said he heard from the female officers, the stench from the solvents used in the department's armory are equally unbearable, Cavanaugh said.
"The smell doesn't get out because there's no ventilation," she said.
Cavanaugh said she and her fellow officers make the best of "unpleasant working conditions."
The armory is rather like a jail cell, though the station has none of those. The smells of the solvents used to clean weapons are overwhelming.
"To sit here and have to work on firearms for eight hours," Collins said, "it's just not fair."
It's claustrophobic.
Such are the conditions in the stiflingly hot boiler room, which doubles as the bicycle storage room.
Some 15 bikes are cramped into the space, some hanging from hooks on the walls.
Since the room gets so unbearably hot, Collins said, officers have to work on the bicycles elsewhere in the building. That is, once they carry them up the narrow stairwell.
"It takes an awful lot of upper body strength to get those bikes up the stairs," Cavanaugh said.
Lockers and the equipment that sits on top of them bloat the male locker room, which is also in the basement.
"It actually has brought the guys in the department together," Collins said, "because it's so comical."
What is supposed to be the radio equipment room is a space stuffed with everything from buoys to car seats and from halogen lamps to windshield wipers.
But in order to get to the windshield wipers or anything else for that matter, the room has to be emptied. It's stuffed, literally, from floor to ceiling.
Back upstairs, Collins took a reporter and photographer into the combination kitchen and roll-call room.
It's not the worst room in the place. That's because, with money for materials donated by Millstone Power Station in 1994, the force's officers, on their own time, gave the space a complete makeover, according to Collins.
Engineers from Northeast Utilities redid the ceilings and walls in that portion of the stationhouse, Collins said.
It's a passable break room, replete with a soda machine and a wall-mounted television set. But it isn't big enough to hold the entire department for roll call. To that end, Collins said that sometimes, instead of officers peeking in from an adjoining room or hallways, it's just as easy to hold roll call outside, in the parking lot.
The reception area offers no divider between the public and the receptionist, Mrs. Murphy. Nothing but a waist-high, saloon-style swinging door.
"They're not going to mess with me, though," Murphy said jokingly.
She noted the obvious, saying that while the "department has grown with the needs of the community," the building "has never grown" to fit the needs of the department.
Murphy has worked in the station for 22 years.
On the way out, Collins showed a reporter and photographer the fingerprinting station, otherwise known as the lobby.
Police in town sometimes compare their facilities with those in Stonington, a town very close in size to East Lyme with police forces about the same size, as well.
Talking about Stonington's facility and department, Collins said, "They wouldn't want this building in their parking lot."