Darien Police Receive Almost $50K Grant

The Darien Police recently received two grants from the federal government that the department will use to advance the training of officers.

The first grant, called a “formula grant,” was for $17,700 and will help cover overtime costs related to active shooter and tactical training. These costs are for training above and beyond the mandated shooting training required for each officer.

“[The overtime training is] so we’re better equipped and prepared—God forbid—if we had a situation in an office or school that required a rapid deployment of officers,” said Chief of Police Duane Lovello.

The formula grants were distributed based on the crime rate of the town. However, Lovello said the crime rate in 2006, when the government looked at the rates, was higher than normal due to an incident at the Calvary Baptist Church in which 40 people were poisoned.

“It did artificially inflate our crime rate,” Lovello said. “We don’t normally see assaults of that volume, and we had 40 in one incident. It was just an anomaly.”

The second grant for $30,000, is known as a “pass-through” grant, and one that every community receives from the Office of Policy and Management based on population.

The Darien Police Department has decided to utilize this grant to purchase audio and video recording items to make training videos for their officers. The equipment will include cameras, software, computers and teleprompters.

Originally, the police had worked out a schedule with Darien High School to use their audio and video recording equipment to make the training videos. The scheduling did not work out in the end.

“The school was limited in the amount of time they could lend us the studio, and the students needed to run the equipment,” Lovello said. “While the concept was great, we couldn’t find a way to deliver it.”

Captain Fred Komm came up with the idea for the department to purchase their own equipment to create the training videos.

“These would be actual training videos where we would cover different topics for officers to deal with in the field,” Lovello said. “It’s difficult to schedule [training for] 51 police officers. If we could nail the high risk type of things on a daily basis, they could leave role call with a new message.”

The videos would run approximately five or ten minutes and would be filmed on site. The topics of the videos will vary, including topics such as how to handcuff someone properly, how to handle a diabetic emergency, and how to pursue a suspect.

“We can prepare a compact, succinct script, so [the videos] can be professionally done and delivered,” Lovello said. “The Teleprompter I think is important rather than having an officer read off a script. We could demonstrate different things. As an officer is demonstrating how to do something, they could read off a prepared script and not have to worry about their hands being occupied by an index card.”

The grants will become available to the department in October.

“I think it’s a home run,” Lovello said, about the ways the grants will be used.