The Lakewood Police Department this week has hired several new police officers and more are on the way, Police Chief Rob Lawson tells TLS.
Some of the recent hires are currently in the Ocean County Police Academy and will be graduating in several weeks. Once graduated, the officers will go through an approximately ten-week training with an FTO (Field Training Officer) under the directive of Sergeant Rob Shimanovich, before hitting the streets solo.
The remainder of the recently-hired officers will be hitting the roads much sooner than a standard newcomer, being that they either previously served in Lakewood, are currently on the force as a Class ll Officer, or served as a Class ll Officer elsewhere.
Soon hitting the roads, will be former Special Officers Andrew Meyer and Tymur (Tim) Zavalnyuk, and newcomers Brandon Burkhardt and Austin Letts.
In addition, several other officers (pictured at Police Headquarters today) were hired by the LPD, and will be joining the upcoming Academy class, which begins this coming Monday. The Academy is approximately five months long, and the new officers will hit the roads around mid-January, 2015.
The new officers, says Chief Lawson, will replace the retiring officers, which include the recent retirees as well as Sergeant Kenny Work, Lieutenant Rob Smith (who retired today), Sgt. Willy Clark and others.
With the new officer, the department will once again be back up to an approximately 122-personnel force, the Chief says.
Once the new officers hit the roads, the Police Department intends to promote several officers to the supervisor position. [TLS]
We cannot afford more officers. The LPD should focus on areas where the crime is. Adding more officers does not help and eats away from the tx rolls. Newark and camden both high crime cities did away with adding officers because the could not afford to add more.
Hey haze, when you have a clue at what your talking about, come back. Until then put down the christie flavored Kool aid, I think you’ve had too much
I agree with Haze. I think we do not need the full force. We were fine as is. Taxes are too out of control.
“We were fine as is” ???? are you kidding me? we were fine with each shift having minimum man power or even less than the absolute minimum? how can they focus on the high crime areas when the little amount of officers on the road are too busy to even stop for two minutes between calls to even attempt to do anything proactive against the crime that is running rampant in town?
you want a police force that is only REACTIVE to calls like accidents or shootings and burglaries, running around like chickens with their heads cut off just to keep up with the ever growing call volume? or do you want to hire a few cops to be able to do PROACTIVE police work and in turn decrease the crime that everyone is crying out about?
HAZE, you obviously have no clue what you are talking about. you aren’t even in the ball park of knowing what you are saying.
taxes are out of control due to courtesy busing not due to the amount of officers that we have in this town. technically we should have way more officers than we have now. it seems that they are just hiring the bare minimum just to stay afloat.
do the math, google it, wikipedia…. whatever outlet you choose. check the population of lakewood and then check the national average ratio for comparable cities of cops to citizens there are. we are below the amount of cops that we should have to the amount of citizens there are in this town.
Wow Haze remember that next time something happens to your family and an officer is taking care of something else and cant get there to help but if you had additional officers you wouldnt have that problem and besides the other officers were making alot more than what these guys are starting out at. On top of that in case you didnt notice Lakewood has a gang problem. Open your eyes.
Half the population is children -thats a big difference, secondly there seems to be plenty of time with 3 squad cars at each traffic stop. Not to mention the many stationed around the street closures and construction sites.
The comments on here that are negative are clueless. The amount of calls in Lwood are out of control and need to be realized by the by the community. 99% of the time officers don’t even have time to make a traffic stop because they are so tied up. WAKE UP PEOPLE.