The police chiefs of two up-Island towns are considering sharing responsibilities between their departments to prevent short-staffing.
Aquinnah Police Chief Randhi Belain and Chilmark Chief Sean Slavin both say the Island-wide housing crisis is limiting recruitment efforts, and that a 2021 State Police reform act effectively closed a key program to train and recruit new officers.
Belain is also preparing to work shorthanded after an expected retirement this spring; he expects his team to drop from four officers to three.
The conversations between the neighboring towns are in the very early stages, and nothing has been set in stone. So far the chiefs are exploring options with Chilmark town counsel Jack Collins, and the town’s select board has asked them to come up with timelines for possible options.
Speaking to The Times on Thursday, Belain said he does not expect to reach a working arrangement before his officer’s expected retirement this spring. The more likely result is that he will advertise for an open position, but he is worried about his department’s near future.
“We barely make it with four [officers],” Belain said. “So when you go down to three, I don’t know what’s going to happen. It could be [to] the point where the town needs additional coverage for help with another town.” Hence the idea of working with Chilmark.
“There are shared services, or we’d have help from [emergency medical services] in some situations,” he acknowledged, also noting the up-Island towns’ agreement for mutual aid.
In Chilmark, Slavin said his department is fully staffed, with six full-time officers, and some working part-time. But things could always change. “People are always retiring, or have the potential to move off-Island,” Slavin said. “All the police departments on the Island are having staffing issues, so we’re trying to get ahead of that before we have [them].
“Because if we were to lose one [officer], or even two, it would be a really hard thing to deal with,” he added.
Though the Vineyard chiefs say it’s too early to know how their departments might collaborate, Belain said one option is to look at the officers’ overnight shifts.
Aquinnah and Chilmark currently each put an officer on call overnight, he said, but handing these responsibilities to a single officer could let the other get some sleep, as well as save the cost of paying for their shift.
One thing to work out before trying the approach would be whether the officer could respond fast enough to an emergency in either town, he added.
“[Collaboration] is just a thought now,” Belain said. “We must figure out how it would work before bringing it to town voters.”
Much of the reason why chiefs are on edge is due to urgent housing needs on an Island where many workers are unable to buy a home, and where rental prices spike each summer.
Slavin, who has worked 15 years in Chilmark’s police department, said the housing crisis is leading to a lack of retention and new hires.
“Departments get good candidates,” Slavin said. “They work here two, three years, and realize ‘I’ll never be able to buy a house here, I’ll go off-Island somewhere that’s cheaper to live.’ We’ve lost some really good officers.”
The other major recruiting problem for police on the Vineyard and elsewhere in Massachusetts is the loss of a summer officers program, which the chiefs say was a feeder program for all Vineyard police departments.
In 2021, Gov. Charlie Baker signed into law “An Act Relative to Justice, Equity, and Accountability in Law Enforcement in the Commonwealth,” in response to global outrage over George Floyd’s murder by police. One effect of that legislation, the Vineyard chiefs told The Times, was that all police — even part-time summer officers — needed to undergo the training for a full-time officer, which includes a police academy class of around five months’ time.
Once all police needed to have the training for full-time work, it became exceedingly difficult to find anyone willing to serve as a summer officer, Slavin said,
“When they enacted the police reform, that essentially did away with the summer police officer program on the Island, because training standards went up so high, you could no longer have lesser-trained officers,” Slavin said.
This also put a wrench in the established career ladder for Island officers. “We used to be able to hire someone as a parking attendant and see whether they could be a good fit,” he added. “Then we could let them be a summer police officer a couple of summers, and see whether they want to do it, and that would be our feeder program. Now you basically need the same training as a full-time police officer to be a summer police officer.”
Belain used to run the Vineyard’s program to train summer officers, and he said departments are now making do with the applicants they have. “[Since] that program went away, you see many departments hiring traffic or community service officers, because that’s the entry level [now],” he said. “And they don’t have any arrest powers. They can direct traffic and issue parking tickets. That really hampered small police departments in the western part of the state.”
“You used to know people were interested and were good candidates for [the full-time] recruit academy. Now you have to trust that they are,” Belain added.
Looking into the future, Slavin predicts tough days ahead for Vineyard police recruitment. “We just see the writing on the wall,” he said.
“Like anything else on the Island, [there are] housing issues, and a shortage of people looking to become police officers. I think that has to do with police reform, and people wanting to do other things,” he said. “You can make as much money doing something else less stressful, and with less impact on your personal life. It’s a national crisis of fewer people wanting to become police officers, and we have it in Chilmark here.”
And although some Vineyard officers have moved to other departments to address short-staffing, Belain says that solution is not sustainable.
In his opinion, there’s no easy fix. Barring impactful housing legislation in the future, he said, aspiring officers will have to come from the Vineyard. “The people are going to have to be living here on-Island. I don’t see any other way around it … We have got to figure out some sort of housing.”
