Stamford Police Injuried Serving Warrents

[Guest]

Read this article this morning in the paper and it looks like a pretty intense incident occurred while Stamford PD were serving a warrent.

Article was taken from the Stamford Advocate Website.

http://www.stamfordadvocate.com/news/local...local-headlines

[x152 179]

Read this article this morning in the paper and it looks like a pretty intense incident occurred while Stamford PD were serving a warrent.

Article was taken from the Stamford Advocate Website.

http://www.stamfordadvocate.com/news/local...local-headlines

←

Ironically, this article appeared in today's edition of the Stamford Times. Also take note of the comment about 10-20 Fire Fighters being laid off effective July 1, 2007......

Police to cut back due to slim budget

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By AMANDA PINTO

STAMFORD — The city police department will likely reduce staffing in the narcotics, detective, youth bureau and school resource divisions in order to cope with a $1.8 million cut to the department of public safety, health & welfare's budget, Public Information Officer Lt. Sean Cooney said Wednesday.

Police Chief Brent Larrabee detailed the department's response to the cuts at a Tuesday staff meeting, Cooney said. Larrabee did not return phone calls for comment.

The school resource program will likely see its nine to ten officers slashed to about four or five, Cooney said.

Officers will likely be removed from all schools other than the high schools, he said.

"That's a shame because that's been a very successful, very popular program," Cooney said.

Efforts to capture Internet child predators will likely be scaled back, Cooney said, and the department's foot patrol — made up of seven officers and two sergeants who walk the city's busy downtown — likely faces elimination, Cooney said.

Police are not allowed discretionary overtime spending beginning June 1, Cooney said, because Larrabee is trying to reduce overtime spending by about $1.5 million, as per requests from the board of finance.

While overtime may be used to fill the mandatory minimum of 18 officers per shift, officers may not be used on an event-based basis.

This means patrols will likely not be dispatched to non-life-threatening calls when a shift is about to end to avoid overtime, Cooney said.

Instead, patrols will be sent out when a new shift begins, likely resulting in a service backup, Cooney said.

"The public are going to feel the effect of the wait times, perhaps significant wait times, for non-life-threatening calls," he said.

Plans to hold another academy class, which would have yielded about 15 new police officers for the understaffed city departments, were also scrapped due to cuts, Cooney said.

This perpetuates a "vicious cycle" within the department, Cooney said, as the department could see as many as 20 retirements this year.

"Cutting the academy class might be a short term solution, but it's going to exacerbate the long term problem," he said.

Announcement of the service cutbacks comes after the recent reduction of the minimum number of police officers on the streets each beat.

Patrols were cut to 20 officers during the day, and 18 working each night – down from 24 and 20 officers respectively, Police Union President Michael Merenda has said.

The mandatory minimum number of officers on each shift is 18, but Larrabee has employed 22 to 24 officers per shift in the recent past.

Larrabee has said he needed officers above to mandatory minimum in order to focus on Internet crime, youth services and homeland security initiatives.

"We're going to do the best we can, obviously the boards have cut a lot out of the budget and it does have ramifications, and those ramifications have spread across the city," Mayor Dannel Malloy said of the police cutbacks.

William Callion, Director of Public Safety, Health and Welfare, said "dramatic cuts" made service reductions inevitable in public safety.

"There's obviously no wiggle room in this budget, the same thing is true with fire, there will probably be layoffs," he said.

Callion said 10 to 20 firefighters will likely lose their jobs by July 1.

Positions have been cut from the health department as well, Callion said.

Board of Finance Chair Mary Lou Rinaldi said cuts were made to force efficiency and empower management to address issues within their departments.

She said the board didn't eliminate the police department's vacant positions, or its overtime account, as it did in other departments, because it understood the importance of public safety.

"It was a very large budget and we didn't make those decisions lightly," she said. "I'd just encourage [the chief] and everybody else to be creative in managing the budget."

The cuts leave the police department with a less than optimal budget, for which their appears to be no remedy in the near future, Malloy said.

Reductions in service may render Stamford's police force "small and reactive," Cooney said.

"Unfortunately the public is going to see a significant reduction in services that we're going to be able to provide," he said.

[Guest partyrock]

Its almost criminal whats happening to the Stamford PD, but how does the FD losing 10 to 20 get almost completely ignred?

[Guest]

Just curious here, but how does a "layoff" work in the civil service environment?

[cas2383 22]

Employment at will is a b1tch!!

Civil services in many cases must wait out the contracts of the union providing the service if so or most likely a buy-out clause... good luck to everyone working for the city.

[JetPhoto 626]

These idiots are playing with a loaded gun pointed right in their own face!

[Guest partyrock]

Stamford is far from the first dept to lay-off firefighters. Sadly its only going to become more common as fire duty declines.