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Crime & Safety

Council Approves Staff Changes to Franklin Lakes Police

An ordinance adopted Tuesday will add additional sergeants to the force and replace retiring officers.

The Franklin Lakes Council on Tuesday night approved changes to staffing in the police department, appointing fresh faces to fill vacancies caused by retirements and adding additional supervisory officers to the department’s staff.

An ordinance adopted by the council expanded the number of sergeants permitted on the force from four to six, simultaneously promoting two officers to replace retiring sergeants and two to newly-created ranking positions in the department.

The new salaries for the two added sergeants, which are based on rank and years of experience and dictated by union contracts, will cost the borough just over $13,000.

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The four sergeant positions already in place within the department oversee the force’s four patrol squads, and the two additional sergeants are detectives who officials say needed the rank because they already take on supervisory roles in their position.

“It’s a position with a lot of responsibility that comes attached to them, and they’re sometimes in a position to direct other officers,” Chief Joseph Seltenrich said.

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He added that the elimination of an executive officer position, which assisted the chief with the day-to-day operation of the department, has strained the supervisory structure in recent years.

The borough also appointed two new officers, chosen from a pool over 400 applicants, Seltenrich said, to fill vacancies left by retirements in the department. The size of the force, now at 21, will remain the same.

According to the FBI, the size of the department is slightly under the national average; in 2011, the last year for which statistics are available, the average police force had 2.4 uniformed personnel per thousand residents. The population of Franklin Lakes at the last Census was 10,560.

Seltenrich said that up until the last few years, the force had been at 23 uniformed officers.

James Economou and Dennis Hill will be the fresh faces patrolling the streets after their training is complete. Both come from families with officers in other Bergen County towns, and both graduated college with criminal justice degrees from William Paterson University and Rutgers, respectively.

Economou, a Ringwood resident, has been a dispatcher in Franklin Lakes for a year and a half, and will attend the Bergen County Police Academy beginning next month, with the start of field training expected late this year.

Hill, a resident of Newfoundland, NJ, is already enrolled in the Passaic County academy and is expected to begin field training next month.

Seltenrich said he is confident that both, after spending six to eight weeks with training officers upon graduation from the academy, will be long-term additions to the department’s roster.

“We always look for officers that are going to make us better,” he said, “and that’s what I think we have with these two gentlemen.”

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