Brookfield police vehicle in August 2019.

BROOKFIELD — Drivers need to slow down and officers need new patrol rifles, the town’s police chief told the Board of Selectmen this week.

During Monday’s meeting, Chief of Police John Puglisi summarized efforts by the department to operate efficiently despite a staffing shortage and weapons that lacked needed upgrades including optics, lights and sound suppressors.

Using automated speed enforcement signs has been a help pinpointing speeders and ticketing them, he said, but complaints still surface that people are driving too fast on local roads.

“In this current environment, we are having a hard time hiring officers to replace the officers who have retired,” Puglisi said. “So we are forced to do more with less.”

One problem, he said, was equipment. The police department asked for more than $141,000 to replace and upgrade the rifles carried by officers and buy more storage lockers to accommodate them. The board voted 3-0 to approve the expenditure.

In a letter sent to the Board of Selectmen on June 1, Puglisi wrote that the department’s Firearms Training Group was concerned over the department’s issued weapons.

“The (25) rifles in service that Brookfield owns ... need extensive upgrades of the rifles themselves and most of the required accessories,” Puglisi wrote in his letter.

The money would pay for 37 new firearms with accessories, upgraded in-vehicle rifle locks and 38 lockers to store weapons inside the police department.

The current department locker only holds 20 rifles, according to Puglisi, who said it is typical for each police officer to have their own patrol rifle.

“That is 20 and we own 25, and we have 34 sworn officers right now at this moment — if we add anybody we don’t really have the facility to store any of it,” Puglisi said.

As for speeding, Puglisi said the police department has used grants from the state’s Department of Transportation to fund cell phone enforcement and measures to enforce against drunk driving, but said there is no state funding available to help enforce speed limits.

Instead, he explained, the department uses automated speed enforcement signs to help guide when and where officers are deployed to issue tickets.

First Selectwoman Tara Carr said she appreciated the chief’s comments, particularly given the number of complaints submitted to her office from residents across town.

“It is helpful just to relay what is being done back to the public, especially when there are a lot of concerns coming in,” Carr said. “I know it is tough out there and that you are working short staffed.”

The speed signs have “helped us tremendously,” Puglisi said. “It’s capturing the number of vehicles, it’s capturing the speeds, the times, and we use that to then schedule officers in selective enforcement,” he said.

Puglisi said that speed limit enforcement used to be based on crashes and complaints from the public; now the department has added automated speed sign technology. Puglisi also encouraged residents to continue to report high speed areas in the town.

“We try to put the signs ... to get a good feel for if putting an officer there for an hour or two at a time is a good use of our manpower, because, like I said, we are pretty short on people,” said Puglisi.

Asked Board member Steve Dunn, “Does that have any long-term effects overtime, or do you have to stay on top of it?”

Puglisi said that anecdotally, the enforcement has “somewhat of an impact in reducing crashes … but as far as reducing people’s desire to speed or the need to speed, it tends to, as soon as we are not there, people go back to their old ways.”

Board member Harry Shaker said the speed signs, from his perspective, helped tamp down on speeding along his road.

“I can’t tell you how many times we have woken up in the middle of the night with cars on peoples’ front lawns, accidents — the police put up the electronic boxes and it stopped, on our road, it stopped. It’s not like it is better, it basically stopped,” Shaker said.