WESTFIELD – At the Westfield Police Commission meeting on Jan. 12, the commission conducted interviews with Sgt. Doug LaValley, Sgt. Scott Phelon, and Sgt. Mike Gibbons for the vacant lieutenant position before promoting Phelon.

For the interview portion of the meeting, each candidate was separately asked the same set of questions before jumping into a discussion with the department’s leadership.

One of the questions the candidates were asked was how they would handle team building in the department as a lieutenant.

“The key to developing a good team is being transparent and being a good communicator. I think you need to balance the needs of your officers and make sure the mission of the department is still being executed,” LaValley said.

“It’s about trying to fit round pegs into round holes, trying as best you can to give people, if they have a strength or desire to work a certain assignment, to try and put them there and in the best place to succeed. I think trying to teach guys as they go and improve is a big part of the job,” Phelon said.

“It goes back to mutual respect, if I respect them and the work they do, I believe they will respect me back. I would do a good job for supervisors because I respected them, and they respected me. Therefore, I wanted to go out and do the best I could for them and the organization,” Gibbons said.

During the interviews, each candidate was asked how they would hold themselves accountable for their actions if they were disciplined.

“If I mess up, I mess up. I’ve had some minor cruiser accidents so if it’s my fault, it’s my fault. Trying to blame somebody else is not particularly helpful to anyone in that situation,” Phelon said.

“I take 100 percent accountability for every action I take. You are not going to progress forward as a person or an officer if you don’t learn from your mistakes,” Gibbons said.

“I learned how to be introspective to understand the situation I was in, to listen to the message that was passed on to me, to become a better person and police officer. I would carry that forward and use it to become a better police officer, a better supervisor, and to pass that example on to other people,” LaValley said.

Capt. Jerome Pitoniak said that he saw each of the candidates evenly but gave the slightest edge to Phelon.

“For the lieutenant’s position, they are the be-all, end-all; they are the safety net for the Police Department. They need to be reviewing reports and behind a desk so I’d have to give the slight edge to Scott, but it’s pretty much a dead line,” he said.

For Capt. Mike McCabe, he said one of the most important parts of the job was holding themselves accountable for their actions.

“You have to take responsibility for your actions, you have to look at yourself. If you’re not willing to do that, you can’t really lead and follow to the best of your ability. I look down at Scotty Phelon and he’s been in a position where he accepts responsibility, Mike accepts responsibility, so I see the two of them as being best able to lead the department from the lieutenant’s perspective,” he said.

While Chief Lawrence Valliere said that Phelon needed additional experience with patrol, he had plenty of other experience at the department.

“I think he still has a little growing to do on the patrol side of things only because he has been in the Detective Bureau, but I do believe that that is an important piece of experience to have. He’s also a sexual assault investigator and that is a huge piece of experience too,” he said.

The entire commission agreed with the department’s leadership and unanimously approved Phelon as the new lieutenant.

Phelon’s first day on the job as a lieutenant was Jan. 16.