Time to change the station, says Agawam police chief

May 11, 2022 | Hannah Murphy and Michael Ballway
news@thereminder.com

Police Chief Eric Gillis stands in the hallway outside Agawam Police Headquarters’ medical supply station—a closet off the kitchenette and breakroom.
Reminder Publishing photo by Michael Ballway

AGAWAM — Before heading out on patrol, if Agawam police officers need to replenish the medical supplies in their cruisers, they know where to go: the closet in the kitchenette.

Sergeants who need to file a report make a beeline for the dispatch center — because that’s the only place the department could find to build them an office.

Evidence? That could be in any one of four cramped rooms or lockers, none of them close to another, including the main storage area in the musty basement. Watch your step going down the wooden stairs.

It’s almost like Agawam Police Headquarters wasn’t built for police work.

Because it wasn’t. For the past 35 years, the town’s police have been using an old elementary school as their station.

“We moved here in 1987, and at the time I believe everyone did the best they could with what they had to work with,” said Police Chief Eric Gillis, “but at the end of the day, it doesn’t carry us forward as it should.”

At a meeting this week, the Agawam City Council was slated to begin discussing Mayor William Sapelli’s plan to move the police into a new building. Sapelli is proposing that the town purchase the Hub Insurance building — the former Oaks banquet hall — at 1070 Suffield St., Agawam, and renovate it as a police station.

Gillis said he and members of his staff were part of the planning process, and he believes the plan for the Hub building will meet his needs. He said if money were no object, he’d prefer a new, purpose-built police station, but the proposed floorplan on Suffield Street will give police most of what they need, and at a much lower cost.

What they need, more than anything else, Gillis said, is to move out of the century-old converted schoolhouse, the former Faolin Peirce School, where they have been for the past 35 years.

Initially, it was an upgrade over the police’s previous home — tight quarters in the basement of Town Hall. But the town has grown since the 1980s, and so has policing. The police station on Springfield Street has to support more electronic equipment, house more permanent records and hold on to more evidence than it did three decades ago. It’s running out of space, and even though recent fixes, like the basement evidence room, allow the police to meet the minimum standards of the law, the patchwork approach is inefficient.

Take the evidence rooms as an example. Items collected in connection with an investigation—including not only the instruments of crime, but also blood-stained garments and impounded cash—starts in the small workroom where patrol officers write their reports. They secure the items in temporary evidence lockers, which can only be unlocked by an officer specially trained in evidence custody. That officer then needs to carry the items halfway across the station, however, for more permanent storage in one of the other evidence rooms. If there’s a large amount of evidence to move, he uses a supermarket shopping cart.

In a more modern station, Gillis said, all evidence storage would occupy a single suite. Patrol officers would enter their evidence in temporary lockers on the outside wall, and the evidence officer would open the other side of those lockers inside the suite, close to the permanent storage areas. He said he was able to include an evidence suite in the Hub building proposal.

Gillis said the weight room in the current station is largely unused, except as a charging station for radios — electrical outlets being at a premium in the 1910s school building. Gillis said he’d like to get rid of it, as the Police Department provides memberships in a local gym, and expand the adjoining locker rooms and bathrooms to give officers enough space to wash up and change their clothes, particularly after returning from an incident where they encountered bodily fluids or dangerous chemicals. But the walls around the weight room are load-bearing, so officers are stuck with tiny lockers and bathrooms that can serve one person at a time.

“The amount of equipment that officers carry nowadays is insane. … These are things I need to do my job,” said Gillis. “There is not adequate space in our locker rooms for our officers. A lot of times officers need to bring their stuff and wear their unforms to and from their homes.”

Although he stopped short of saying the current building puts officers in danger, Gillis said he does have safety concerns with the layout. Between the booking desk and the sally port — the drive-through garage where cruisers can unload arrestees in a secure environment — is a door to the outside.

“The door to freedom,” Gillis said.

Once inside, he added, there are no doors dividing the corridors into separately secured sections. Particularly sensitive rooms such as the evidence room, the detectives’ room and the cell blocks have their own locked doors, but an unauthorized person loose in the building would have access to several areas.

Gillis said he’d also like to see the dispatch center enlarged and separated from officers coming and going to use computers or have discussions.

“Is it useable? Yes, but it could be better,” he said. “In the new location, dispatch, for example would have their own space that has their own kitchenette, bathroom, and it would be their own, rather than everyone using their space to do their own work,” said Gillis.

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