The Aquinnah Police Department is teetering on the edge.
What was a department of four to start the year — two patrol officers, a sergeant, and a chief — has fallen to a department of one: Chief Randhi Belain. Officers have either aged out, are on leave, or have left for another department. And even the lone man standing, Chief Belain, who has served the department for three decades and whose father served as chief before him, is expected to retire in eight months.
The staffing problem is compounded by a shortage of new recruits, due in part to housing and to what some see as onerous training requirements to be eligible to serve. All of this has left Aquinnah facing the possibility of soon having no uniformed officer of its own to uphold the law.
While the town has worked to address the issue, there are understandable concerns about public safety for the future of the smallest Island town if something isn’t figured out.
In the short term, the Aquinnah department has cobbled together help from other agencies to make sure they have some form of coverage. Over the summer, Aquinnah leaned on the Dukes County Sheriff’s Office and the Massachusetts State Police — at a hefty price — for patrols and to respond to emergency calls, a temporary solution which public safety officials have told us has worked. But even those resources are starting to dry up. Both agencies have their own staffing issues. The sheriff’s office, after the summer agreement with Aquinnah ended in early September, has relayed to the town that it can’t help as much going forward, and subsequently, it is asking for more money to help. Belain tells The Times that the two State Police officers that provided coverage over the summer are expected to reduce their time up-Island as well, possibly completely in the next month.
All the while, the tab to patrol the town continues to grow. Aquinnah is paying the Sheriff $90 an hour to cover the night shift. That’s a lot of money — more than $700 a night — when there’s very little activity up-Island.
Left with few other options, the town is in discussions with Chilmark, with the hope that the neighboring up-Island town could send routine patrols into Aquinnah daily and in the evening, and respond to the area if there is a call. How that will look, and maybe more importantly, how much Aquinnah will have to pay for those services, isn’t yet known. And Aquinnah doesn’t have much of a leg to stand on when it comes to negotiating — it doesn’t have many options.
It’s an untenable situation, to say the least.
But taking a wider look, the bigger worry for the Island is that Aquinnah may in fact be the first domino to fall. While maybe not as extreme yet, it isn’t just the up-Island department that is struggling with staffing. Departments across the Island are relying more on overtime to police their streets, with fewer and fewer applicants coming forward. And it isn’t just the Island. The policing profession nationally is suffering from a public image tarnished after seemingly repeated incidents of police brutality making headlines. Fewer and fewer want to carry the badge and gun.
The lack of staff may be felt more acutely on the Island as it suffers from a severe housing shortage. It’s getting harder, if not nearly impossible, for the missing middle — our firefighters, our teachers, our nurses, our police officers — to make enough money to buy a home where the median home price is well over a million dollars. We can’t help but sympathize with officers who don’t want to grind out a living working overtime when they’ll never be able to afford a home to live here.
On top of that, a recent Massachusetts police reform bill — passed in the aftermath of the brutal George Floyd killing in Minneapolis — has made it harder to hire officers. Departments used to rely on special or seasonal police officers to become full-time officers that would staff out a department. Those special officers historically were not required to undergo the six-month course at the Police Academy. But a new requirement under the bill mandates that full-time officers need to complete the academy. While the bill was intended, rightfully so, to hold officers accountable, police chiefs across the Island note that it is having an unintended consequence of making it harder for remote and seasonal communities to find candidates.
All of the compounding factors have turned Island police departments against one another in a battle to staff their forces. Chiefs have reported that police departments are shopping around and going to other departments to get a better salary, like a game of musical chairs. Officials in Island towns have told the Times that it has happened in nearly every department. On Wednesday night, the West Tisbury Select Board hired the last patrol officer in Aquinnah for its own department. While we don’t blame officers for wanting a higher wage, it’s not a system designed to work well for the Island. Something needs to change.
But with every conundrum, there arrives an opportunity. There is a possibility that the quagmire in Aquinnah may open up the mostly avoided but inevitable discussion on the Island: the big, bad “R” word, regionalization.
Chief Belain, in his comments to The Times this week, said that he plans to retire, not just because it is his time, but because he wants to get out of the way of the effort to regionalize the up-Island police departments. He even didn’t rule out the idea of working for another police department. In discussions with Chilmark, Aquinnah may be making the first real effort to regionalize the departments.
For a chief with a long family legacy serving Aquinnah, his support for regionalization is telling. And the argument for regionalization makes considerable sense. If West Tisbury, Chilmark, and Aquinnah were to regionalize, you wouldn’t be required to have three police headquarters, three holding cells, three special places for K9 units, and three police chiefs. There are seemingly considerable savings that could be seen. It’ll be more difficult to lure officers from one department to another.
At the same time, the Island doesn’t have to look far for a model that works. Tri-Town Ambulance has effectively served the three up-Island towns as a regional service provider.
To regionalize a police force, there are a lot of questions still to be answered. There could be upfront costs that some may not like — How do you work with the contracts of existing police chiefs undergoing regionalization? How many police officers would you try to hire for a multi-town police department, and do you have deputy chiefs for each town? There are wrinkles that need to be ironed out, but Island towns would be wise to figure them out.
The discussions between Chilmark and Aquinnah could be the inevitable meeting that breaks the dam of inaction on regionalization. In a way, it could be an unofficial test pilot on regionalization for the entire Island to watch. We advocate for all Island town officials and police departments to keep a close eye on the talks moving forward in the two up-Island towns. It could be a model for fire departments, and even schools.
With the housing struggles that the Island is facing, and with no immediate relief on the way, regionalization is worthy of serious consideration and action.
