Southington's Police Department: The Case For More Staff

PHILIP THIBODEAU PHOTO

The Town Manager’s budget proposal for next year includes a request for two new full-time police officers. At the February 26 meeting of the Board of Finance, Police Chief Jack Daly came made a case for the new lines, describing the need they would meet, and noting that some of the additional salary costs would be made up for by reductions in overtime.

On March 9, the Outsider sat down with Chief Daly and Captain James Armack at the Police Station for an interview focused on the reasons and the context for the request. The transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

What are the primary reasons for your request for two additional officer lines?

[Chief Daly] Right now we’re budgeted for 73 officers. The town is growing but the public safety division is not. We’ve tried everything in our ability. We’ve put up with the Police Accountability Law, which required us to have more training. The FMLA [Family and Medical Leave Act] is killing us. When I had babies – I had four – I got a day for each of them. Now they get 12 weeks. Last year, we had eight babies born in Police Department families. I know of at least five babies that have been born in 2026.

You can add to that workers compensation. This is still a dangerous job, even in Southington. We have three people out on workers comp right now.

I’m not looking to do more, I just need bodies in the cruisers. We can’t do it anymore without them. That’s the bottom line. We’re looking for cops on the road. You can’t put it off any longer. They’ve got to get us the help we need.

We asked the Fire Department to explain their shift structure. How does it work at the Police Department?

We’re on call 24-7-365. I can’t reveal our shift numbers, but our staffing levels are based on calls. We know how many calls come in between x hour and y hour. We can bring people in on overtime, and we can have a 2-hour shift, that’s the minimum. We staff as needed.

When I first became a cop, everyone wanted overtime. This new generation of employee, they have a work-life balance that I’ve never had. They’ll give you 125% when they’re here, but they love their time off. If they do have to work overtime, they want comp time. So we have to give them comp time at time-and-a-half.

[Editor's note: when an employee works overtime, they can either receive overtime pay for those hours, which is typically 50% more than their regular rate, or compensation time, which is an hour-and-a-half of time off for every hour over what is required.]

There are not enough cops here to fill all these vacancies. I’ve been a cop for 42 years. These cops will probably live forever because they’re a lot smarter than I was as far as this work-life balance. We’re also getting very qualified individuals. When they’re here, they’re phenomenal, but they love their time off, and you can’t blame them.

What do your officers spend the most time doing?

It’s a combination of things, there’s not just one thing you could point to. We get a lot of domestic violence cases. We get a lot of EDP’s – ‘emotionally disturbed people.’ It requires more personnel for that because of deescalation. You have to calm everything down, slow it down. So it takes more personnel on these calls.

Due to the Police Accountability Law, the paperwork is considerably more than when I started. The expectations are a lot more as far as court paperwork goes, the reports and forms. The different types of cases require more time. It’s not like we have had a huge increase in cases; it’s that more is expected.

People don’t want to hear us say that we’re too busy to do certain things. Everyone calls and they want radar run on their street, the cars are going too fast. But we can only get to as much as we can get to. We’re jack-of-all-trades, master of none. We do our best with what we have. We’re really getting strained and they need to realize that. Incident numbers are steady but expectations grow from court, paperwork, citizens. There is time off, and we have to honor that. The perfect storm has come.

How hard is it to hire these days?

When I came on we would get hundreds of applicants. We still do pretty well because we’re a good department. People like Southington. A lot of the people we’ve been hiring are certified officers from other departments. Some have retired from other departments and come here for a new career. The town let us overhire this year. We were budgeted for 73 but they let us hire for a guy who is retiring next month. That’s what saved us. When one guy walks out the door another guy takes over.

Can the department or the town take advantage of grants?

We’ve applied for grants in the past. But Southington is a well-run town. So when it’s a choice between Southington and Hartford, we’re not going to get these grants. We put in for a grant for a middle school SRO [School Resource Officer], but didn’t get it.

We asked for two officers and I’ll tell you why. The officers work eleven-and-a-half hour shifts. Two days on, two off, three on, two off, two on, three days off.

[Captain Armack] It’s called the Pitman schedule. It gives round-the-clock coverage.

[Chief Daly] So the second person works the opposite days off. That way we have the coverage when we need it.

How does Southington compare to other communities in terms of number of officers per thousand residents?

We are way under. We should have a lot more than we’ve requested. I could ask for ten and justify it that way. Do I need ten? Sure I do. But you got to give a little to get a little.

Like I said at these budget workshops, if you give me these two cops, I can reduce my overtime by a portion [to make up for it].

Is being stretched affecting response times?

I don’t think we’re there yet, but I don’t want to get there. You can’t just budget for the oh-my-God moments [when many officers are needed]. You have to find a happy median. There are times when calls get stacked, so you have to wait a little longer. There are also times when there’s no calls. You’ve got to find a happy median. We don’t want it to get excessive.

Do you have a mutual aid agreement with other towns?

There’s always that. There’s a Capital Region emergency response. For those oh-my-god moments we could call them and get a response. It’s the same way with the Western Region. We’re right on the border between both and we’re part of both, we can get people from either side. It’s called the Blue Plan – for the Fire Department, it’s the Red Plan.

Is there anything I didn’t ask that you think people should know?

[Captain Armack] The one thing I would add is this. We’re a full-service police department right now. I take pride in that, the Chief takes pride in that. All of our families live in town, it’s a great place to live. I think people don’t realize that.

What does ‘full-service’ mean?

[Captain Armack] To me that means if you pick up the phone and it’s the worse day of your life, nobody judges. We’ll send a police officer to you and they’re going to help you.

I think that relationship with your community is what every police department in America strives for, and many fail. They’ll just say, ‘you’ve got a car accident, go call your insurance company.’ For some people that’s the worst day of their entire life. We’re not here to be the judge of your experience, we’re here to help. When we talk about staffing, we need to keep doing that stuff. You don’t want to cut services just because the state is asking more of you.

[Chief Daly] I like to tell this story. I was a brand-new cop out of the academy, still living with my parents. I got a call out of Spring Lake Village, some lady needed help. I’m a young cop, I didn’t know what I was going into. Some lady is in her bedroom yelling. I make my way into the bedroom, she says, can you help me pick out an outfit for a doctor’s appointment tomorrow? I’m blind and my caregiver is away. So there’s a 21-year old guy whose mother still picks out his clothes, he picks out a skirt and a blouse to go with it. I helped her and I felt good about it.

Do we pick out people’s clothes these days. No, but we’ll go the extra mile to help people when they really need us. That’s something to be proud of. Some people who come here from big cities don’t get it at first, but they love it now that they’re a part of it. We don’t want that to change. We don’t want to become so busy that we don’t care about people.