SOUTH HADLEY — Despite a recent police staffing study suggesting South Hadley hire five more officers to fill in patrol gaps, residents at a recent forum had a different idea — reduce the workload of existing officers by spending more to address the root causes of public health problems rather than adding those responsibilities to the Police Department.

Doing that, some residents argued, would improve public safety in town.

“All of these things that keeps being piled onto your (police) plates sounds like a systemic issue that’s existing outside of the police that needs to be addressed, but instead the town is just throwing money at it and making it your (the police department’s) problem,” resident Hector Lomelin said.

The police staffing study, conducted by Municipal Resources Inc (MRI), used data from the police department and staff interviews to predict future call demand and compare South Hadley’s Police Department to surrounding towns.

The data shows that South Hadley has fewer police staff proportional to population compared to surrounding towns, but also spends less per resident on policing. South Hadley police officers also handle less calls per officer than Easthampton and Belchertown. The study suggests hiring more officers and dispatch workers to fill in patrolling needs and lighten administrative workloads of officers.

Town Administrator Lisa Wong and Police Chief Jennifer Gundersen led the forum on Oct. 23 to gather input on public safety investments, accomplishments and challenges in the community. Despite the forum centering around MRI’s study, most residents addressed data that Gundersen presented on the increased time, paperwork and responsibilities of police officers.

“Twenty years ago, we did not have a call type crisis,” said Gundersen, who became South Hadley’s chief in 2019. “We did not go to crisis calls because there were other services out there in the community. When other aspects of government reduced their services, unfortunately, the burden often falls on the police department.”

Crisis calls in South Hadley increased from 301 in 2020 to 487 in 2023. Additionally, officers are responding to more calls for other services than before, from bomb threats in schools to narcotics violations, physical assaults, illegal gun violations and general calls for service.

Officers are also more frequently asked to investigate digital crimes, like identity theft, phishing, financial fraud and harassment on the internet, adding more responsibility that didn’t exist 20 years ago, Gundersen said.

The amount of hours it takes to process each call and prepare police for these new roles have also skyrocketed, Gundersen noted, stretching the department’s resources thin. In addition to more training, the chief said arrest reports take twice as long to write as in the past to meet the updated standards. As a result, patrol supervisors spend over 50% of their shifts filling out paperwork, scheduling trainings and completing other ancillary duties.

“I think that that speaks a little bit to the complexity for the calls for service that we are experiencing in this community,” Gundersen said.

None of these statistics Gundersen mentioned at the beginning of the forum were listed in the police staffing study, which residents noted diminished the quality of the study. Some said MRI’s study was biased, using a limited number of data points to come to the conclusions that require much more rigorous data analysis.

Alanna Hoyer-Leitzel, resident and a professor of mathematics at Mount Holyoke College, noted that the study did not provide any methods on how MRI arrived at their conclusions about staffing needs and trends, nor did it break down service calls by type to identify community needs.

“This is not a data-driven study about what we need or what the police department needs or what the police department is doing,” Hoyer-Leitzel said. “I think it’d be very unfortunate if we sold it as a data-driven analysis because it’s not rigorously upheld”

A majority of the feedback from residents asked police and municipal departments to allocate more resources to the root of community health issues like mental health, substance use and homelessness rather than provide more police officers to address the symptoms of the issue.

Lily Newman noted that she struggles with the fact that the town funds two school resource officers, but the South Hadley School District cuts staff vital to the social-emotional state of youth. She added that some residents do not associate an increased police presence with better public safety.

Lomelin asked several questions about the amount of community outreach work to see what responsibilities could be cut. Gundersen continued to advocate for outreach and its vital role in building trust with the community. Instead, Wong and Gundersen looked to gather more information about addressing issues outside of policing rather than removing the department’s resources.

“This sounds like a conversation we want to have not only with other departments, but also we need to have a better understanding of those root causes that are associated with non-municipal entities,” Wong said.

Emilee Klein can be reached at eklein@gazettenet.com.