Police department welcomes six new officers
Recruits were recently laid off from Trenton
The police department recently welcomed six new patrol officers to its ranks, all of whom were recently laid off by the Trenton Police Department.
The new recruits — Joe Leon, Crystal Everett, Thomas Gogan, Matt Czajkowski, Barry Hollo and Jonathan Cincilla [pictured above] — were sworn in last Friday and yesterday was their first official day on duty, Police Chief Mark Kinmon said.
This brings the total number of officers in Asbury Park to 87. In 2010, the force had 95 officers.
“We just started losing people,” Kinmon said of the reduction in the ranks. “We’re just trying to catch up with replacing everybody. Sometimes it’s not as fast of a process as you would like it to be.”
This is partly due to the fact that Asbury Park is a transitional aid city. Because of the extra funds the state gives to Asbury each year, Trenton has the final say over the department’s new hires, and it is the state that gives Asbury Park Police Department a list of potential new hires each year, Kinmon said.
Normally, the department tries to hire city residents who meet the requirements. Kinmon said he initially questioned the state’s decision to place former Trenton officers in the Asbury department, “but it was out of my hands and out of the city manager’s hands,” he said.
But hiring police officers with two to four years of experience has its benefits. Normally, a new-hire who comes straight from the police academy needs three months of ride-along time with an experienced officers, Kinmon said. “In this case, because some officers we hired have over four years of service with Trenton, we’re able to do a much shorter field training program so we’re looking at about 30 days [of ride-along time] until they’re assigned by themselves.”
Also, some of the officers have “pretty extensive training in their assignments,” he said. “I think they’re going to fit in nicely here. It’s a little lesson in staying open-minded.
