Police departments nationwide are struggling to hire officers. How is Hamden PD responding?

The Hamden Police Department is seeking officers, but over the past few years, it has had trouble closing the gap — and it is not the only department facing that predicament. 

Currently, the department, which is budgeted to hold a staff of 103 sworn officers, is reporting a deficit of seven officers, according to Timothy Wydra, Hamden’s acting chief of police. Since 2020, that number has fluctuated between seven and 19 job openings. 

Despite a hiring surge — the department has brought in about 35 officers over the past two years — approximately 30 officers have left or retired over the same time period, thinning out the older ranks of the force. 

“You have to make do with less staffing, and sometimes, you’ve just gotta get creative,” Wydra, who announced his retirement from the force on Oct. 2, told HQNN. 

While the vacancies comprise under 7% of the Hamden department’s total budgeted staff, understaffing levels are somewhat higher in larger municipalities. New Haven, which has a significantly larger department than Hamden with 410 sworn officers budgeted, has 46 vacancies — just over 11% of its budgeted staff — a representative confirmed to HQNN. 

Wallingford Police Department — a municipality with a smaller population than Hamden by roughly 16,000 people — is budgeted for 78 sworn officers and currently has five vacancies, Lt. Stephen Jaques said. 

Crime rates in Hamden have fluctuated between 2017 and 2022, and it’s impossible to say if a deficit of officers and minimum patrol numbers have had any concrete effect on whether crimes are committed or not. 

For example, robberies went up 27% between 2019 and 2020, and then decreased by 14% the following year. In 2022, robberies were back down to 2019 numbers, according to the department’s December 2022 report. 

Most violent and theft-related crimes did increase at least slightly overall between 2017 and 2021, the most obvious being motor vehicle theft, which nearly doubled in Hamden over that time period. 

Other violent crimes saw less growth, for example, there was one murder in 2017 and one murder in 2018. 2019 saw two murders and 2020 and 2021 each had three. In total, a 2% increase between the four years. 

As a result of officer vacancies, the department has instituted more overtime and cut down on ancillary units, axing the Traffic Division and Narcotic and Gang Unit to help fill vacancies in patrol. 

“We have minimum staffing levels in the patrol division … but a minimum isn’t necessarily what we want; we want more than a minimum,” Wydra said. “The vacancies have caused a crimp over the last couple of years in service delivery, but not in minimum service delivery.” 

Sgt. Angela Vey, the Hamden PD public information officer, said that increased overtime can be emotionally and physically taxing — yet lucrative for officers. The town budget for fiscal year 2023 allotted more than $1.2 million in overtime and holiday pay for police. For FY 2024, that number was just under $1.8 million.

The state of police staffing

People in the police business agree: it’s a difficult time to be recruiting officers. 

Data from the Police Executive Research Forum, a Washington, D.C.-based organization that conducts research on issues in policing, found in its August 2023 report that overall officer staffing levels in the police departments it surveyed fell by nearly 5% between January 2020 and 2023. 

Officers hired nowadays in Hamden can retire after 25 years, but those hired approximately 15 years ago are on a different pension plan, allowing them to retire after just 20 years. There are currently about 30 officers still in the department under the old pension plan who are reaching the age in which they can collect a pension, Vey said. 

A relatively short required working period means many choose to leave the department earlier in life and pursue other employment, sometimes seeking lateral positions in other departments that are higher-paid, Wydra said. 

Further complicating matters, many departments with aging populations just don’t have the interest to continue to replace retired officers. Between 2020 and 2022, 65% of departments surveyed reported an increase in retirements, but 69% also saw a drop in the number of applications they’ve received, according to the PERF report. 

This is certainly the case for Hamden PD, where police said they’ve seen fewer applications in recent years, a fact they attributed to changing generations, a lack of trust in police and shifting employment trends. 

“People aren’t applying to become police officers right now. There’s a significant decrease in the applicant pool,” Wydra said. 

Hamden Mayor Lauren Garrett called the turnover and issues with recruitment “challenging.” 

“(In the past) you’d have 100 people apply to be an officer in a community and only really have openings for a couple,” Garrett said. “We’re just not seeing those numbers. Maybe we have 20 people apply, and then half of them, I would say it’s more than half, get cut.”

Though Hamden PD is operating under minimum patrol numbers, some residents said they’ve seen fewer officers patrolling town. 

Eva Allego, who has lived in the community for two decades, said she’s noticed fewer police regularly patrolling her street over the past few years. She said her husband’s car was broken into at their home off of Whitney Avenue, and her personal security cameras did little to deter the crime.

Andrew Tammaro, a Hamden resident for 25 years, said he’s noticed fewer police in town lately. 

“Especially over the past five years, people have really started to see a decrease in police presence,” Tammaro said. 

Tammaro said he would feel safer for himself and his family members if there were more police patrolling high-traffic locations, like shopping centers. 

“People start to notice something is a little bit different in their community, they feel a little bit less safe going to the grocery store,” Tammaro said, referencing Hamden Plaza, which has seen at least three robberies since November 2021. 

Why are departments seeing less interest?

Experts blame a combination of shifts in public opinion and generational values for the paucity in applications. 

Kimberly Przeszlowski, an associate professor of criminal justice at Quinnipiac University, studies policing and its impact on communities. She said the May 2020 murder of George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer entrenched an already existing distrust of police, especially among younger generations. 

Notably, former Hamden police officer Devin Eaton pled guilty in January 2022 to first-degree assault in connection with the April 2019 shooting of then-22-year-old Stephanie Washington, an unarmed Black woman, according to court records. 

“If we look at the differences in generation, so we always kind of think that baby boomers were the perfect fit for policing, just because of how they grew up in the times of society … and Gen-Z is a very different population,” Przeszlowski said. “And so we’re not necessarily catering to these individuals the way that we should be.” 

Vey said she’s also noticed a generational gap, which she attributed to young people choosing other trades and professions over public work. 

“Some of it, I think a lot of kids are going to college more, we’re getting a lot of applicants that are older,” Vey said. “When I got hired, we were all very young.” 

Where does HPD go from here?

For Przeszlowski, the key to recruiting more officers may lie in a combination of better pay and benefits, speeding up the testing and academy process and loosening some standards, such as requirements that applicants don’t have priors for marijuana offenses. 

Notably, the Hamden PD has relaxed its hiring standards in regards to past marijuana use since the drug was legalized for recreational use in Connecticut in 2021, according to Vey. 

When it comes to salary, Hamden police officers are pretty much guaranteed a stable living: an entry-level salary is listed between $70,100 and $95,000, with the potential to jump to over $93,600 after two years. 

On top of a generous starting salary, In fiscal year 2021, the town of Hamden reported that among town employees, all of the top 50 earners were police or fire department employees. Wydra was fifth on the list at the time, making more than $190,000, while the highest-paid employee, officer William May, made more than $224,000. 

But a lengthy hiring process often weeds out even qualified individuals. 

“It (takes) about a year to actually get onto the police force, and what we’re seeing is that life happens, and you’re three months, four months in and you’re waiting around and another opportunity arises,” Przeszlowski said about recruits who drop out during the hiring process. “You’re now losing that one individual and our hiring standards are all over the place.” 

Przeszlowski suggested that perhaps individuals serving in community resource roles, such as social workers, can stand in for police officers in areas hit hard by shortages. 

“Should we be having officers go to every single type of incident that occurs, whether it is violent or nonviolent, or if it deals with mentally ill offenders or domestic violence,” Przeszlowski said. “There’s this idea that you don’t need a badge and a gun to necessarily repair the trauma in a community.” 

This is an idea the city of New Haven implemented under the name  Elm City COMPASS team. Established in the wake of Floyd’s death, the team consists of social workers and peer support specialists who respond to 911 dispatches in crisis situations — such as those involving substance use or mental illness — alongside emergency crews. 

While the Hamden department doesn’t have mental health professionals who ride along with police while they respond to crisis calls, officers do utilize the state’s 211 network to connect individuals with mental health, crisis and substance use professionals, Vey said. Officers are also instructed to refer individuals in domestic violence situations to resources like the Umbrella Center for Domestic Violence Services.

However, the road to a full staff might be paved by a combination of cultural shifts, spurring police departments to assess the role of policing, provide resources for officers — such as mental health services — and better align themselves with a younger community, Przeszlowski said.