By Monica Potts
Staff Writer
October 2, 2007
STAMFORD - With the Stamford Police Department facing budget cuts, its assistant chiefs last night appealed to the Police Commission to hire new recruits to offset overtime pay and help halt rising violent crime.
Assistant Chief Robert Nivakoff told the commission that 18 robberies, three serious assaults and the year's first homicide occurred last month.
The bomb squad has responded to 46 incidents in the last six months, compared with an average of about 20 annually in previous years, an officer from the bomb squad said. The increase was attributed by police officials to better officer training and public advertising campaigns encouraging residents to contact police about suspicious packages.
Nivakoff and Assistant Chief Susan Bretthauer said that the minimum staffing levels now in place were part of a union contract negotiated in the late '60s or early '70s, and with the city changing, required staffing levels need to be revisited.
Nivakoff said that even if officers could work overtime, adding new officers to the force was a more forward-thinking approach.
"If we stay the same, we won't be progressive, move ahead or even keep up," Nivakoff said.
Bretthauer said five new recruits are in field training, and two former trainees who had left applied to return. Only one potential spot is available for the department in the state training academy's March class, and Bretthauer and Nivakoff urged the commission to consider sending recruits to a local academy.
Nivakoff said he believed robberies were a benchmark of street crime, and the recent spate of robberies troubled him.
Although Stamford remains among the country's safest cities for those with populations of more than 100,000, according to statistics from the FBI, violent crime has increased 30 percent over the past two years.
The department recently announced staffing cuts in special squads to address the shortage in regular patrol squads and to reduce overtime spending, which reached $4.8 million in 2005-06.
Last night, Police Commissioner Michael Berkoff told police officials that the information they can provide will aid efforts to have budget funds reinstated for the department.
Copyright © 2007, Southern Connecticut Newspapers, Inc.