#CompTime 1: the time I went to the State Police Academy
I’m someone who learns by seeing and talking to people. My wife pokes fun at me for being the only millennial who still calls customer service to pay bills and ask questions instead of doing it all online.
As Comptroller, I sign the paycheck of every Connecticut state employee, negotiate their health care and oversee their retirement benefits. It seemed only right that I get to know what they do for our state and what better way to do that than to shadow them at work.
That’s where the idea of #CompTime was born. Each month, I’m going to try my best to shadow a different state employee and then take you inside what a day-in-the-life of that person/occupation is with a follow-up post here.
For our first #CompTime, I went to the Connecticut State Police Academy in Meriden to check in on our recruit class and then for a ride-along with a current Trooper.
Here’s a behind-the-scenes look at what I saw:
History
The Connecticut State Police were created by the legislature in 1903 making them one of the first state police departments in the US. Initially, the department was five men who were each paid three dollars a day to enforce state liquor and vice laws. Their initial focus? Stopping the production of moonshine!
Lunch in the mess hall
State Police recruits spend 28 weeks training at the Academy and actually live there Monday-Friday away from their families. Their instructors are there with them Monday-Friday too. I started off my visit sitting down with the instructors for lunch to learn about the program and to ask questions.
A big part of our conversation focused on how they teach recruits to make decisions. Troopers are unique within law enforcement in that they spend their shifts almost entirely on their own policing highways or rural areas. They need to be able to make quick but informed decisions in a job in which those decisions can be life or death for themselves or others.
It was clear the commandant of the Academy, Lt. Ryan Maynard, and his team spent a lot of time thinking about this and how to instill good decision-making skills in the recruits.
Class
The Academy is a rigorous mix of physical and classroom training and the recruits here are in Week 13 of 28.
It struck me that, three months in, they had not done firearms or driving training yet.
The class I sat in on was about evidence collection, another really important thing a Trooper must do on their own at a crime or crash scene.
While the recruits were in class, I popped over to the dorm to check out their accommodations.
In the field
After class, I put on a bulletproof vest per State Police policy and headed out on the road with an active-duty Trooper from Troop I which is based on Bethany.
The State Police have eleven troops throughout the state. What each troop does differs based on the troop and the location.
The Trooper I was with was assigned to patrol a stretch of I-691, I-91 and the Merritt Parkway. I immediately knew what they meant at the Academy about the Trooper being on their own covering a large area.
Over the course of a few hours, I saw Troopers doing things most of us take for granted like checking on people with flat tires or personally moving debris out of the lane so people wouldn’t hit it.
Yes, while I was there, I did see them doing the typical things you expect like speed checks and enforcing trucks illegally driving on the Merritt.
But it hit me that a lot of what our Troopers do is the unheralded and unseen stuff that makes the hundreds of thousands of us who drive on the roads each and every day a little bit safer.
It’s a challenging time to be in law enforcement, but during the day I saw people committed to serving our state and making it a better, safer place. And for that, I’m grateful and I hope you are too.
