Honesdale, the Wayne County seat, is grappling with a critical question: how to maintain public safety when the borough cannot afford full 24/7 police coverage.
The Honesdale Police Department has three full-time officers and four part-time officers. Officials say at least nine full-time officers are needed to provide round-the-clock coverage.
“Part-time officers can help fill in at different times, but part-time officers have a lot more freedom than full-time officers about when they choose to work,” said Liam Mayo, news editor at The River Reporter. “And the graveyard shift is called the graveyard shift for a reason. It’s not exactly the prime territory for someone looking to pick up an extra shift. So if you want to regularly cover overnight, that kind of needs to be full-time officers and that’s something where Honesdale just doesn’t have enough of those to provide that kind of coverage.”
Funding Limits Expansion
Financial constraints limit Honesdale’s ability to expand the police force. About half the borough’s property, including government buildings and nonprofits, is tax-exempt.
Mayo said, “If you take that amount of budget going to support three full-time officers as well as some part-time officers, and then you try and extrapolate out to what would be needed to cover like full overnight coverage with nine police officers, the math just doesn’t really add up for that to be something the borough can realistically attain without major changes to the way it’s taxing or to its overall government structure.”
Recruiting Challenges
Honesdale competes with nearby departments like Scranton for officers. Pay disparities add to the challenge: full-time officers earn less than part-time staff, though they receive benefits.
“Even sort of beyond that, we spoke to you said that a lot of police departments right now are struggling to hire people. So there’s just a lot of like these little factors, some of which would be in Honesdale’s power to change, some of which are just broader across the ecosystem of police hiring right now,” Mayo said.
Leadership and Union Negotiations
Chief Richard Southerton resigned around a year after suffering an on-the-job injury. Lieutenant Don Thatcher, with over 20 years of service, was promoted.
“He’s been sort of leading the department for a while. Now while Southerton was out on medical leave, he stepped up to serve as the officer in charge,” Mayo said. “Officials seemed excited to work with Thatcher… saying that he’s kind of been able to have conversations with Thatcher that seems just very positive in the way the department can go forward into the future.”
Union contract talks over salaries and retirement benefits remain stalled, potentially heading to arbitration.
“So it’s this back and forth between the borough needing to offer the benefits and salaries to both attract new candidates to the bureau as well as keep the people on staff it already has, as well as sort of pay attention to its own books and make sure that what it is giving police officers doesn’t put the bureau in extended financial strain,” Mayo said.
Community Discussion Possible
Mayor Derek Williams suggested a town hall to discuss realistic police coverage.
“There’s a lot occasionally the conversation will come up of well, why doesn’t the Bureau have overnight police coverage or the Bureau should have overnight police coverage or expanded police coverage? And it’s easy to say that, but the real conversation about whether that could happen needs to be paired with sort of this very real look at what that would cost,” Mayo said.
Image Credit: Borough of Honesdale