When Police Chief James Babu met with the Finance Committee Jan. 18 about his department’s fiscal 2024 budget, FinCom Chair Jen Finch went straight to the point. The committee’s biggest question, she said, was his request to hire an additional officer.
In response, Babu said Harvard has the smallest police department in the area, with nine full-time and three part-time officers. Only Berlin, with a much smaller population than Harvard, has so few officers. (According to the 2021 annual report, Harvard’s population was 5,844; the 2020 census gave Berlin’s population as 3,158.) The last time Harvard added a full-time police officer to the force, Babu said, was 20 years ago, when he himself was hired. While there have been personnel changes since then, the numbers have remained the same, he explained.
“A community with a police force strength that is not keeping pace with its growth presents a clear public safety issue,” Babu said in his written answers to queries from the Finance Committee. The biggest issue can be slower response times to calls, he wrote.
Babu’s goal, as he explained it to FinCom, is to have two officers covering every shift. Reaching that goal would require adding two full-time officers, one in fiscal 2024 and another in a later year. Currently, he wrote in a report on police staffing, the department provides 24/7 coverage by requiring overtime for some shifts and having an officer working alone on other shifts. Filling all of those shifts with overtime, he wrote, would cost well over $100,000. Savings in overtime would offset part of the cost of adding an officer.
“Finally,” Babu wrote, “we cannot just look at the financial impact of filling the [new] position, but the overall well-being of the existing officers. There is no doubt that the 24/7 operational environment takes its toll.” He cited fatigue, risk management, quality of life, and job performance as areas that could be adversely affected by too much reliance on overtime.
FinCom’s written questions about the proposed police budget also considered other requests. One was a hybrid Ford Police Interceptor for a total cost of about $64,000, after all the specialized police equipment was added. A Green Communities grant, coupled with the savings on gasoline, would offset part of that cost. The Police Department already has two hybrid Interceptors, which were replacements for older, all-gasoline Ford Explorer Interceptors.
