15 June 2010

All’s Quiet on the Small-Town Front

 

Middlebury neighbors are in good hands!

Middlebury neighbors are in good hands!

By Brian Heyman

This essay is excerpted from Pop Culture versus Real America, published by the Bureau of International Information Programs. A profile of the television show CSI: Crime Scene Investigation appears here.

The summer sun is shining brightly over the one-story brick police station on Route 188 that runs through the not-so-wild western Connecticut town of Middlebury. Head further down and you might not even realize you just drove through the heart of this tree-lined, 18.5-square-mile [47.9-square-kilometer] middle-class community. It’s about 1 o’clock back at the station, and in a side office with the word “chief” on the door, Richard Guisti is sitting at a computer in his dark blue uniform, working on an e-mail, taking care of the administrative end of his job. The computer desk is filled with pictures of his wife as well as his two sons, now in their 20s. His diplomas and training certificates hang on the wall above. On the opposite wall, there are framed pictures on both sides of a bookcase, showing one son playing high school football, the other competing in swimming. Above the bookcase, there’s a frame surrounding four photos of former greats playing baseball for his beloved New York Yankees. On the desk behind Guisti, there’s a Yankees cap sitting on one side and three figurines on the other — a policeman with a protective arm around a girl and an angel guarding his back.

The police chief is a down-to-earth, 48-year-old family man. Guisti coaches youth football and high school basketball in his native Waterbury nearby and has been a fixture in the Middlebury community since moving here 25 years ago. It’s a town of a little more than 7,000 people, where the violent crime rate is very low.

Television and movies often depict police work as an endless series of car chases and exchanges of gunfire. But those images don’t match the reality here for Guisti in this small town and so many municipalities across the country.”TV, I know you see the chases; you see the bank robberies; you see the shootouts,” Guisti said. “We do a lot of community calls for services. Being a smaller town, we have two major arteries that come through our town. So we do a lot of motor-vehicle accidents, a lot of motor-vehicle enforcement, because we get a lot of traffic. We’re first responders for medical calls. ... We still carry the equipment to get into vehicle lockouts. Still the small-time community policing.”

 

Report writing is a huge part of a police officer’s job.

Report writing is a huge part of a police officer’s job.

Guisti was promoted to acting police chief in 2005 and permanent chief in 2008. He began in Middlebury as a part-time police officer in 1985, left for another nearby department in 1987, and came back full time two years later. He has been in two, maybe three car chases here, none in almost 20 years. And about the gun that sits in the holster on his right hip? “We draw our weapon at robberies,” Guisti said. “But I’ve never had to actually fire my service weapon.”

Now he is in more of a supervisory role, overseeing 14 officers and eight dispatchers. Yet the chief will also head to a scene when needed. “I have responsibility for the overall operation of the Middlebury Police Department, from budgets, to training, to scheduling, to discipline,” Guisti said. “I’m also in charge of communications. We dispatch fire, police, and public works. I’m the direct supervisor. You have to multitask. I’m not saying I’m Superman or better than any other chief. It’s just that you’re so small, if my guys are tied up, I take calls. I leave this office. They could be tied up on a call, and I would have to go out. I’ve investigated car accidents. I respond to burglar alarms. If my lieutenant is not working, no matter what time it is, if we have a burglary or smash [a car window] and grab, I may have to go out and supervise until I can get somebody to go in.”

When he or his officers investigate further, Guisti said they use “the phone, e-mails, computers. When I came on in ’85 ... you didn’t have e-mails; you didn’t have cell phones; you may have had a computer. These officers right now can get in their cars, and if they have a burglary, they can type it into their computer and send it to just about every department in the state [to check] if they had a suspect or anything similar. ... You’d be surprised by the amount of information that comes back, saying, ‘We had something similar,’ or the exact same description of the car, the suspects.” These officers also go out and use their training to interview people. Or they stake out areas. “Technology has gone a long way to help law enforcement, but you still pound the beat,” Guisti said.

Unlike on TV, it can take considerable time to solve a crime. “In CSI, they solve everything in eight hours; that’s not realistic,” said Sergeant John Desmarais, a 15-year veteran of the Middlebury force who coaches football with Guisti. “I would say our percentage of solves ranges from 60 to 70 percent, which is very high. ... We know our community. We know who to talk to. For example, on the midnight shift, the paperboy sees everything.”

Back when he was a boy, Guisti’s goal wasn’t to protect and serve the public. His father, Fred, was a toolmaker and his late mom, Ellen, had a real estate business with her sister. But Richard loved sports from the time he was 5 and wanted to be a professional baseball player. Then, at about age 14, he was playing in a summer-league game in Waterbury when a policeman spoke to him. “If you’re not going to play professional baseball, why don’t you become a cop?” the officer said to Guisti. “I said, ‘Yeah.’ You laugh at it,” Guisti said. “He goes, ‘Be a cop. Be like me. You’ll like being involved with people.’”

It led him to a career that began in 1982 with work as a sheriff at the Waterbury courthouse, where he learned a lot about law enforcement. Now Guisti can look back with a sense of pride. There have been crimes he helped solve, like the time when an elderly person experienced a burglary of items with much sentimental value. Nearly all were recovered. “That was gratifying because you knew that … they were going to be victimized themselves every day because of that reminder of what they had in their house was there for years,” Guisti said, adding that it was solved “just through legwork, information through other departments, information that we ascertained through our department.”

Beyond that, he hopes he made a difference in a role you don’t usually see on police shows, steering young people on the right path through the work he did for eight years in the local school system. He taught about the dangers of drugs through the program known as DARE: Drug Abuse Resistance Education. “It’s gratifying to see the kids that you taught are now grown up and they have children,” Guisti said. “I see children that are now doctors, dentists, police officers, teachers. Several of them, I’ve been to their weddings. That’s what I tell my officers. If you can influence one person, you did your job.”

Brian Heyman has been a sportswriter in the New York area for 27 years, earning numerous national and regional journalism awards. He is a staff writer for The Journal News, a Gannett daily newspaper based in White Plains, New York, and freelances for The New York Times and the Associated Press. He grew up in Ossining, New York, and graduated magna cum laude with a degree in communications from Ithaca College in Ithaca, New York.

(This is a product of the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://www.america.gov)