Mayor looking to add three police officers to budget

04/27/2007

By: Tristram DeRoma , Editor

When the budget is finally approved, the Stratford Police Department may be adding three new police officers to its roster.

That's because Mayor James Miron has requested the department add three new police officers in an effort to strengthen the town's fledgling community policing program as well as cut down on overtime.

The department started the program about a year ago when the police department took three officers from its patrol division in order to create a "community resource officer unit."

According to the mayor, this took a big bite out of the department's regular patrol division, forcing supervisors to call in officers to fill the police union's minimum quota for patrol. This also allowed officers that wanted to draw overtime to do so at time and a half their hourly rates.

"This in effect caused the department to pay an additional 50 percent more in payroll to keep the CRO unit functioning," said Miron in a statement included with the budget.

The mayor's proposal has garnered mainly positive views from within the department as well as from town representatives who could use the addition in their district.

Police Sgt. Shawn Farmer, president of Police Union Local 407, thinks the mayor's proposal is a good idea. For far too long, he said, the department has been understaffed at an inefficient level.

"It (new officers) would be a tremendous benefit to the department," Farmer said. "Anything we can get would be a good thing."

Councilman Angelo Stavola, D-4 also thought the proposal had merit.
"I can't disagree with that at all," he said. "Any addition would have a positive effect on the south end of Stratford."

There is also opposition to the proposal, however. Critics of the plan, which include Councilman Michael Henrick, R-10, are afraid that the proposal will allow even more overtime abuse by department supervisors. Henrick and others claim that some of the recently retired police officers dramatically padded their pension plans through a clause that allowed them to add overtime they accumulated doing unnecessary desk duty, spiking this year's pension payout for recent town retirees to well over $1 million a year. While some of the officers' average incomes were between $40,000 and $60,000, many retired with yearly pensions of about a $100,000 due to the factored-in overtime. Henrick said before any officers get added, he'd like to see some administrative reforms take place within the department that would result in patrolling officers getting overtime, not their deskbound supervisors busy building their golden handshakes.

"I understand the need for more officers," said Henrick. "But the police chief needs to monitor who's getting the overtime and where is it being applied. Is it going toward people pushing pencils or is it for officers patrolling our streets?" It's criminal how they have stockpiled the pension."