Chief Andrew Lavoie
Posted by Hugh Phillis
on Nov 09, 2015
On November 9th Chief Andrew Lavoie, Chief of the Nashua Police Department addressed the Rotary Club of Nashua regarding the Nashua Police Department. He is the 34th police chief for Nashua. He has 29 years on the force. Chief Lavoie talked about the department being Nationally Accredited that is a relative rarity among police departments. More than 400 separate criteria must be evaluated and passed. Less than 1 % of the police departments nationwide have this recognition.
Nashua PD has over 250 employees of which 170 are police officers that is a large police department. It is probably in the top ten size-wise in New England. There are a number of bureaus within the department that manage specific areas such as professional standards, detective, crisis negotiators, bomb squad, SWAT, crime scene investigation.
Over 4500 arrests occurred in 2014. They are a full service department and handle most of the specialty areas – drug undercover, bomb squad, crime scene, etc.
Their drug task force has handled over 193 drug overdose, 22 fatal so far. By pairing with federal agencies that multiplies their effectiveness. Fentanyl is the overdose drug most commonly found as the cause. It is 80-100 times more powerful than heroin. A drug pipeline from Lawrence, MA seems to be the main source. The drug problem is the key driver to burglary, theft and other addiction driven crimes that are used to fund the habit.
The Drug Court is helping to speed up the process for drug crimes and get drug addicts into treatment. The police serve as the enforcement arm of the process. More places for treatment for addicts are needed.
The police force is currently 9 officers short of their budgeted capacity. Finding quality candidates for the position is a challenge. The current generation of applicants has some different attitudes. Only the top 2% of the applicants qualify and go to the academy for 4 months. In total, it takes about 1 year for a new officer to go from entry to being ready to be on the street. The typical successful candidate has a college degree, military service, additional training, is in excellent physical shape and successfully passes screening/background checks.
Officer Training is taken very seriously. Some of the national incidents seen on shooting incidents can be due to a lack of training on the number of ways that different situations can be handled. Use of force is a way of delivering pain compliance to get the subject to comply with the officer’s request. Training is the key to dealing with the variety of situations found on the job.