The co-chairs of the Public Safety and Security Committee and a ranking Republican member expressed bipartisan support Tuesday for making the recruitment and retention of first responders the committee’s highest priority this year following a meeting during which they raised 13 legislative concepts for consideration in the months ahead.
One of the co-chairs – Rep. Patrick Boyd, D-Pomfret – said both police and fire departments are struggling to find and keep officers and firefighters.
“Police departments across our state – small, large, and the state police – are struggling to get qualified candidates,” Boyd said. “And fire departments are struggling to get people who can meet the minimum standard.”
Boyd said the problem on the fire service side is complicated by the fact that Connecticut’s fire departments are overwhelmingly volunteer, and this creates a whole different set of recruitment and retention issues. Boyd said the committee plans to consider ways to help create some stability for volunteer fire departments.
“But even our paid departments are not seeing the quality of applicants that they had had,” Boyd said. “Both are going to hit a crisis so we’re trying to work on it now and slowly chip away at this larger issue.”
The other co-chair – Sen. Herron Keyon Gaston, D-Bridgeport – said many of the state’s police departments are hemorrhaging in terms of not having enough staff to fill their ranks.
“We want people to understand that being in law enforcement is an honorable profession,” Gaston said. “And we also want to ensure parity and we are addressing some of the concerns around retention and recruitment.”
He said there’s been a mass exodus of people leaving law enforcement based on a variety of reasons over the past several years.
“I think that we have to think about the holistic officer, and not necessarily this idea that society has about officers being very militaristic,” Gaston said. “But that they’re well-rounded, and that they are inter-culturally competent to be able to service our entire population which is a very diverse constituency.”
Gaston highlighted three ideas that the committee will look at: educational incentives, homeownership programs, and some financial incentives, including bonuses and/or tax incentives.
“I’m looking at more educational incentives for officers because statistics show that the more educated an officer is, the more likely they are to be forward thinking around engagement in the community and less likely to engage in certain kinds of behavior,” Gaston said. “We’re also looking at potentially an incentive to keep officers on the force who are already on the force through a bonus.”
Gaston said a homeownership program would “kind of tie into officers who may want to live in a respective municipality but can’t necessarily afford a home. This might entice them to want to live in the community to which they serve. I think that speaks to the 21st century model of policing” and where the industry is headed withcommunity-based policing.
Aside from bonusing officers, he said they’ll consider a tax incentive or tax break of some kind “for officers who may chose to live in certain municipalities and certain towns. I think it’s going to be very beneficial, especially to rural towns and to urban towns because when these officers are living there, their wages are a little higher, often, and it increases the tax base, and also it changes the composition of the community so it does a lot of good for everybody.”
Gaston said discussions thus far about exploring these ideas have been fruitful.
“We don’t have a perfect template as of yet but we’re tossing around these ideas,” Gaston said, adding that officers and many of the police chiefs they’ve spoken to have been receptive.
The ranking Republican – Rep. Greg Howard, a Stonington Republican and former EMT now working as a police detective – said he’d spoken with two police chiefs and an administrator from another law enforcement organization and all three used the word “crisis” to describe their recruitment and retention situations.
“I’m not trying to be dramatic about this but quite literally, if these positions aren’t filled people die,” Howard said, adding that the lack of available officers is manifesting itself in different ways.
He said motor vehicles are engineered and manufactured to be the safest they’ve ever been, but he said we’re seeing record numbers of fatalities on the state’s roads. He said before 2020, State Police were doing “north of 200,000 stops a year,” but that dropped to about 100,000 in 2023 and then 75,000 in 2022.
Howard said there aren’t more crashes, but there are more fatalities and he said this is the result of an increase in the average speeds motorists are travelling because there are fewer officers and troopers enforcing traffic laws. He also said that despite the use of license plate readers, surveillance cameras, and the availability of cellphone video, the clearance rate for criminal investigations is down from 21% in years past to 16% in the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports.
How to solve it?
Howard said he doesn’t think financial incentives are the right path because a career in law enforcement – as well as firefighting and EMS – is a calling. It’s public service, he said, and they should want these jobs to be public servants rather than for the money. A positive atmosphere, he said, can be a stronger draw than a higher salary.
“I don’t want to create a situation in Connecticut where [people in] these three professions are coming simply for the paycheck,” he said, adding that the paycheck will fail as a method of retention.
The people who do it because it’s a calling “are the ones who are great at the job and best serve their communities,” Howard said.
A big part of the problem, Howard said, is all the negativity that’s been aimed at law enforcement over the last few years and he believes that it has “disincentivized” recruits and is driving good officers out of the profession. He said one of the governor’s bills this year, HB 5055, An Act Strengthening Police Data Reporting Requirements, is one of many disincentives facing police officers.
The bill – which was proposed following the State Police ticketing scandal that broke last year – makes it a Class D felony when a police officer “intentionally makes a false written statement or enters false information or data in a law enforcement record which such person does not believe to be true and which statement or entry is intended to mislead a public servant in the performance of such public servant’s official function.”
He said the profession needs to be lifted up and celebrated when it’s done well, rather than being held to a higher standard only when officers fail.
And with respect to firefighters, he said the legislature has placed more and more responsibility on them for mandatory trainings and testing – “bureaucracy” – and that cuts into their time for volunteering.
They’re not leaving because of pay, Howard said, adding that it is instead a cultural problem.
EDITOR’S NOTE: We updated some data on traffic stops with additional years and corrected Rep. Howard’s current job title, which we’d reversed his former job in the original version of this story.
