People of Shelton — the police do not want to cordon off your neighborhood, evacuate homes, and send snipers through backyards every time they respond to a 911 call.
But they will when they have to, police brass said this week in the wake of a three-hour standoff Oct. 2 on Longview Road.
The standoff was resolved peacefully when a 41-year-old man who lives on the road surrendered to police after negotiating with Sgt. Peter Zaksewicz and Officer John Napoleone for nearly three hours.
But even while the standoff was going on, readers on the Valley Indy’s Facebook page wondered whether the man’s Second Amendment rights had been infringed.
Others said police are becoming too militarized, especially after the Valley Indy posted the picture above, of a police officer at the scene wearing a Ghillie suit, a type of camouflage meant to resemble foliage.
Lt. Robert Kozlowsky, the police department’s spokesman, reached out to the Valley Indy in an effort to explain how police respond to emergency situations — and also how they don’t.
For example, he said, when someone alerts police to a person walking down the street with a weapon, they don’t immediately call in heavily armed special tactical units.
“If we get a call just of ‘Hey, there’s a guy with a gun exposed, we’re not going to go with a SWAT team,” he said. “We’re going to go and our officers will talk to him, verify that he has a valid pistol permit, and if he does he’s on his way. We’re not looking to crack down on people that have guns.”
But The Oct. 2 standoff did not begin that way.
“On this specific case, the person who called said they knew who the guy was and that he had a gun and had left a note that he was going to harm himself,” Kozlowsky said. “This was a totally different circumstance, and the circumstance was this guy needs help, and we need to help him.”
But while they hoped for the best — that the man could be talked into surrendering — they had to prepare for the worst.
What if the man tried to turn the gun on officers in a “suicide by cop” bid?
What if he tried to go somewhere else, like the nearby Long Hill School?
So as Zaksewicz and Napoleone talked to the man to keep him stayed put and to keep the lines of communication open, other officers checked on the nearby school and set up a perimeter around the man’s property.
Some homes nearby were evacuated. Police also took to Facebook to tell residents of the neighborhood to shelter in place.
Police also called the Southwest Region 2 Special Response Team to the scene. It is a tactical unit comprised of Milford, Ansonia, Woodbridge, Orange, and Shelton Police officers. The team is based in the Milford Police Department.
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The team members go through special training for things like dealing with hostage standoffs or other emergency situations.
Shelton police joined the team over the summer and have three officers who are currently part of the unit, Kozlowsky said.
Their first objective: keep the scene contained.
“The last thing we want is a person in a situation like this is get out of our perimeter and possibly put someone else in harm,” Kozlowsky said.
As the police negotiators kept talking to the man, police brass was going over other possible scenarios.
While they hoped to talk the man into surrendering, the special response team was also preparing to use “non-lethal force” to resolve the standoff, like temporarily incapacitating the man using a small bean-bag blast from a shotgun, Kozlowsky said.
Fortunately, the man did surrender, and was taken to the hospital to receive mental health treatment.
Police said it was the first time they’ve called out the special response team since joining it.
“We did research on them and knew they are a very elite unit, but to actually see them up close and to know that we have that resource and the quick response time we got from that resource, it’s an invaluable tool when you need it,” Kozlowsky said. “Sometimes having that amount of force makes a person say ‘OK, let me just give up.’”
Police Chief Joel Hurliman said that the department’s response to situations depends on the threats presented by them.
“If we go to an incident where somebody’s got a knife, we’re not going to bring a knife,” he said. “We’re going to be at a force level above that. So if you’ve got a knife, we’re going to have a gun. If you have a pistol, we’re going to have a shotgun or a rifle. If you have a shotgun, we’re going to have a rifle. That’s how that works.”
To that end, Shelton police obtained 15 high-powered rifles about 10 years ago through a federal government program that directs surplus military equipment to local police departments.
The program has come under heightened scrutiny recently after a police department’s highly militarized response to a protest heightened tensions in a Missouri community where a police officer had killed a teen.
Some departments in Connecticut have obtained pretty heavy weaponry through the program, from mine-resistant armored personnel vehicles to grenade launchers.
The rifles obtained by Shelton police — 10 M16A1s and five M14s — aren’t used by officers on routine patrol, but they’re in their cruisers if they need them.
The impetus to move the guns into the patrol cruisers came after the December 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown.
“At that time all the officers were carrying was their duty weapon, their pistol,” Kozlowsky said. “And we need to have accessible high-powered weapons in certain situations. We want to make sure the officers are there with the proper equipment they need.”
Hurliman and Kozlowsky said the department is looking to acquire two armored Humvees from the federal program — but not for routine patrol use.
“What we’re going to use it for is an armored ambulance” in the event of an active shooting scene, Hurliman said.
“If somebody gets hits and they’re down, we want to be able to go in, put you in it and get out without getting somebody else hit,” Hurliman said. “There’s no weapons on it.”
He said the Humvees could also be used in the event of another massive blizzard like the one that paralyzed travel throughout the state in February 2012 — and left some Shelton cops stranded in their vehicles as the snow piled up.
