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Professionalism rises in police, firefighter jobs as new challenges arrive, training, approaches change

SENTINEL STAFF

For a great many years in this region, the words “police” and “professionalism” didn’t easily fit into the same sentence. If they weren’t feckless volunteers, many police were bullies with a badge, ungoverned by any professional standard.

Their duty, according to a recent history of Fitzwilliam, involved arresting Sabbath breakers. Additionally, they kept an eye on local taverns in case anyone got drunk.

Given the relatively placid state of affairs in the Monadnock Region, there seemed little reason to expect much more of local constables in the past than, say, to monitor conduct at town gatherings. But, as society changed — as population grew, laws were written and laws were broken — modern policing techniques evolved.

The Rindge Annual Report for 1946, for example, noted 13 violations of motor vehicle laws that year, according to the town history committee’s book, “Town on the Border.”

In 1986, the town reported police were called to deal with 2,739 motor vehicle law violations. A consequence: the purchase of cruisers and radar equipment and the hiring and training of full-time police officers.

Away from the traffic beat, other police functions evolved as well, and the resulting professionalism had both good and bad sides, authorities say.

One the one hand, better-trained police could deal more expertly with emerging problems in society — the arrival of hard drugs, the soaring incidence of domestic disturbance and the nuances of white-collar crime — as well as with new laws safeguarding the rights of suspects.

On the other hand, a certain horse-sense was lost, a feel for community that’s in the gut, not the brain.

“We started down the road of professionalism but missed the relationship part,” said Thomas M. Powers, former police chief of Keene.

Edward J. O’Brien, the former Cheshire County Attorney, describes the change this way:

“Before, we had part-timers in towns. They were trained by experience. Then the state set up a school to train officers, even part-timers now. Quite often, you find part-time officers who are pretty knowledgeable. The law keeps evolving, and they have to continually study, and it’s resulted in a different type of personnel.”

“You might have a grandfatherly type in a small town who knows everybody, knows he can mediate and talk with the people and calm down the community or town and come up with some horse-sense answers in regard to the problem. But you can’t use grandfather because he’s not knowledgeable with regard to the law.”

“So you have usually younger, usually trained, sharper individuals. They’re concentrating on the law, and as a result there’s a certain amount of grandfatherly approach to the handling of problems in the towns that’s lost.”

Powers, whose 30-officer police force was largest in the region at the time, agrees that, in the rush to fight crime and deal with the complexities of evolving law, a connection to community has been lost.

He recalls growing up in a small Connecticut town where police were an integral part of the community landscape, not merely crime-fighters or traffic police separate from the whole.

Powers presented the hypothetical case of police officers being called to a home to answer a complaint and finding that, on an unrelated matter, the individual’s yard had flooding problems. The tendency of recent times, he said, would have been to advise the homeowner to call the public works department in the morning. His recommended practice today: Have the police make the call right now.

”Where I was growing up,” Powers said, “the police did that. Everybody took care of things.”

Additionally, he said, the police used to be visible in ways they haven’t been of late. Some changes have been made. For example, he said, during the school year, there’s one officer in Keene eating a lunch every day in an elementary school. Additionally, the police in Keene, as elsewhere, operate drug-awareness programs that put them in direct touch with young people.

He explained, “We need to take a few moments to talk with people, being more involved in their communities,” Powers said, “Police will improve their understanding of community life — the good and the bad. We need to be proactive. Instead of trying to fight crime, we try to prevent crime.”

He conceded, however, that crime has been on the rise. Crime rates are flat or falling in large cities, but crime’s not disappearing, he said. It’s merely moving to the country.

He pegged recent increases in petty thefts, robberies and burglaries to criminal elements exiting the cities. “We see where they’re coming from, he said. “We get a lot of people moving in, do as much as they can, and then split.”

There are ways to respond to the trend, regional policing being one of them. Better coordination among police departments, Powers said, can spread crucial information from town to town.

And, better use of trained personnel can help as well — a step made possible by hiring civilians to handle certain police station functions traditionally part of the daily routines of officers, such as processing evidence, dealing with some fingerprinting and other routine functions.

Bottom line: Trained police have the time to get out on the street and be in the communities they serve.

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