Staffing shortages, communications and best practices in policing. These are the things the Waterbury Police Department needs to work on, according to a recent analysis of the police department.
The City of Waterbury hired the national consulting firm, BerryDunn, to analyze the city’s emergency services.
As a part of its assessment, BerryDunn reviewed the operations personnel, staffing, and community relations and recommended increasing the department’s efficiency, according to a video posted on the Waterbury Police Department’s Facebook page in 2022.
The review was finally signed off by Police Chief Fernando Spagnolo in July of this year.
Inside Investigator was not able to obtain a copy of the report but, according to Spagnolo, BerryDunn made 77 recommended changes to the department’s operations. Sixteen of those recommendations have been fully completed, 52 of them are actively being worked on and nine of them have not been addressed, he said.
The 52 recommendations that the department has started to look at may take a long time to address, according to Spagnolo. The department still needs to understand the fiscal impact of full implementation, and will then need to get approval from the Waterbury Board of Aldermen.
“I think that there are some great recommendations made by BerryDunn,” Spagnolo said. “One is to increase the sworn staff at the police department, which we’re looking into. We are going to apply for hiring grants with the support of the Mayor’s Office to increase the sworn personnel within the department.”
Most of the unaddressed problems have to do with external communications, which is run by the company, Northwest Connecticut Public Safety Communications Center, Spagnolo said.
Northwest handles dispatch services for the City of Waterbury and 13 towns and cities in the Waterbury area, according to the company’s website. Director David Martin said the company changes its operations based on instructions from the police departments it services.
Spagnolo says he meets with Northwest twice a week to address the concerns.
Waterbury Alderman John Alseph, who has reviewed the BerryDunn report and spoken with Martin, is hopeful about what is happening in both the police department and Northwest.
“They did take some of the recommendations that were made into effect and they started implementing a lot of them,” Alseph said of the police department. These changes impacted record keeping, internal communications and shifts, Alseph said.
Northwest has also had some issues in the recent past. In September 2023, a Northwest employee made hundreds of fake 911 calls to boost the company’s call clearance response time. Three employees were fired for this misconduct, according to Martin, who was not working for the company when this happened.
Alseph said he was very impressed with the changes that Northwest was making internally.
“I was able to take what was on the report and tie it in with what’s actually happening down there, and I was pretty impressed that they took the criticism to heart and they saw immediate changes themselves, and they admitted they were wrong,” Alseph said. “I truly believe they have the right attitude.”
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