Troubles At The Hinsdale NH Police Department

The new police officers would get more pay and benefits working at Wal-Mart. I'd seen the trouble outline here before anything ever was written up. I went to the selectmen this summer saying the police department was overwhelmed. I said the nature outcome of this pressure was going to cause a unnecessary police shooting, either a police getting shot or a citizen getting shot, or a big expensive legal suit.

Remember I was involved with a 3.5 year old little boy who was lost, the heroin addled mother was hysterical...I called the police department three times with no response. 

The police department dressed this up in the absolute certainty they can tell the difference between a need of a immediate police response or a non immediate response. People calling 911 are just giving the contact person their impressions of a transitory experience with missing pieces of information. We all got different communication skills. Some are overly hysterical and others downplay events. Prioritizing police responses based on limited resources is extremely dangerous.  Yep, that air of absolute certainty for those in power is a big problem. Especially when the powerful are afraid to speak up with resource problem. 

New police officers, elementary school addition on tap in Hinsdale

By Xander Landen Sentinel Staff

SentinelSource.com

HINSDALE — Voters overwhelmingly approved two big-ticket budget proposals at Saturday’s annual Hinsdale School District and town meetings: the construction of an addition to the Hinsdale Elementary School and the hiring of two new police officers…You need an online service to view this article in its entirety.

No voters raised questions about the operating budget or any warrant article until article 8, which proposed the town raise $184,000 to hire two new police officers.

But when the article was put up for discussion, no one criticized the proposal. Instead, town residents expressed concern over under-staffing and mounting pressure at the department. 

In the police department’s 2016 annual report, Hinsdale Police Chief Todd Faulkner wrote that crime in Hinsdale is up, in part due to the state’s drug crisis.

Faulkner wrote that in 2016, the department handled 805 criminal investigations, compared to 705 investigations in 2015 and made 74 more “on-scene” arrests than in 2015.

With an increase in crime and only eight police officers on staff, he said the department can’t respond efficiently to many of the non-emergency calls it gets. And because of low staffing levels, the department had to request assistance from other police departments 150 times in 2016, he said.

A large burden is put on individual officers, and the department sees a high turnover rate, according to Faulkner.

“We have actually had officers tell us that they left because they burned out,” he said at the meeting.

After asking questions of Faulkner, Hinsdale residents voted in favor of hiring two new officers in a paper ballot vote of 113-24.