East Lyme’s ‘crusader for the downtrodden’ retires
East Lyme — Detective Jean Babcock, known as East Lyme Police Department’s crusader for women and children, said she started out thinking she could rid the town of sex assaults and child abuse if she worked hard enough.
“That was a naive way to look at it,” she said. “It didn’t happen.”
Less than a week after her Feb. 9 retirement from the police department, the 64-year-old sat down for an interview Wednesday at The Day and described police work as a treadmill.
“There’ve been misses, there’ve been successes,” she said of her 29-and-a-half-year career. “You just kind of go to the next case. And there’s always another one. There’s always somebody doing something bad to somebody else.”
Despite the dark frustrations, the perpetually sunny officer who decompresses via Disney vacations said she never considered any career outside of law enforcement. And she wouldn’t do it differently if she could.
Babcock on Monday began the next phase of her career as an investigator with the Naval Criminal Investigative Services at Naval Submarine Base New London.
She said it’s too soon to tell what kind of cases she’ll be looking into alongside the NCIS agents.
Kathy Miller, a retired sergeant with the Connecticut State Police who now maintains records for East Lyme police, on Thursday said the public safety building is quieter without Babcock.
Describing the officer as highly skilled at interviewing victims and perpetrators, Miller said she saw the skills firsthand while working extensively alongside Babcock for about seven years. Miller until 2015 coordinated a multi-disciplinary team of professionals — ranging
from social workers and police officers, to prosecutors – who collaborate on sex abuse cases.
“I think she has a unique style in that she can be kind, but if she needs to, she can flip it,” Miller said. “If you are the accused, she'll be yelling at you like she's your mother.”
Miller also laughingly brought up Babcock's tendency to conduct marathon interrogations.
“She would not give up. She's relentless. She would talk so long we'd be saying ‘land that plane, Jean,'” she said. “I think people got bored listening to her and they'd give it up.”
Family focus
Jean Babcock has been married to Sgt. Bruce Babcock, a 40-year veteran of the East Lyme department, since 2020. But back when she got her start, she was a Cavanaugh married to a different cop. She became certified as a part-time officer in Stonington at the age of 31, about a year after she brought home her newborn son to his 2-year-old sister.
A Waterford resident at the time, she took the full-time position in East Lyme in 1994. The decision was partially driven by the need to be closer to her mother and sister, who would help out the law enforcement family with child care.
“Stonington was way, way this way,” she said, gesturing expansively with one hand to indicate the long commute. “And East Lyme was very close this way. It was kind of a no brainer.”
She raised the young children by day and pulled over drunk drivers at night for most of the kids' formative years.
“They did not know I was working,” she said. “I got to go – to my son's dismay – on all of his field trips. I got to help out with Girl Scouts for my daughter.”
It was almost a decade later that she traded midnights for the day shift. She passed up a promotion to sergeant because the schedule would have included evening hours at a time when her kids, then middle school aged, needed her as driver for their extensive calendar of extracurricular activities.
Babcock's professional focus on young people was honed with her transition to the day shift as she became a Drug Abuse Resistance Education instructor, which segued into work on youth crimes and child assaults.
She also assisted the Connecticut State Police, which oversaw the department at the time, with sexual assault investigations conducted out of “the back room” at the Troop E barracks in Montville.
As one of the few females in law enforcement at the time, she said she naturally gravitated to work with women and children.
“It was a void we had at the police department,” she said. “So I just kind of filled it in.”
She credited the 2017 transition to an independent force under the leadership of Chief Mike Finkelstein with allowing officers to deliver more targeted services to residents.
She characterized Finkelstein as the de facto “third detective” in the department, lending his skills as the department's preeminent interviewer and answering her calls at any hour of the day or night.
“He was my safety net,” she said.
Finkelstein this week said Babcock made his job easier from the start. That's because she was reliable, willing to take on new responsibilities, and committed to the town's most vulnerable residents.
“She was an investigator who cared very deeply about people that were the victims of crime,” he said. “She was a voice for people who didn't have that voice, or who needed help with being heard.”
And she listened as well as she talked, according to Finkelstein.
“She grew up in town so there was so much kind of knowledge that she had of the community that was always beneficial to cases,” he said. “She had the ability to talk to people because she knew them, and they knew her.”
‘Crusader for the downtrodden’
Bruce Babcock said his wife always wore her heart on her sleeve.
“I call her a crusader for the downtrodden,” he said. “The true victims.”
He said Finkelstein as chief saw what a lot of people didn't see: that Jean Babcock's willingness to take on the most difficult crimes made everyone else's job easier.
“I think a lot of people took for granted what she was doing,” Bruce Babcock said. “She picked up a heavy caseload.”
He acknowledged there are no women among the detective bureau made up of Mark Comeau, William Bergantino and William Turcotte. Of the department's 30 full-time members, five are female.
“It's common knowledge most women are comfortable with women,” he said of police investigations. “We're going to have to take care of this soon.”
Finkelstein said Jean Babcock's women-and-children focus will be taken up for now by Bergantino and Turcotte, both promoted within the past few months. The detectives received specialized training in sexual assault investigations and crimes against persons.
“We also have several of the female patrol officers receive training in those specialties as well, so they can certainly assist if the case requires.”
Jean Babcock said the job offer from the submarine base came along at a time when she had already been starting to think about retiring from the job she described as strenuous and demanding.
The woman who worked midnights for so long without getting tired was finally feeling her age.
“It's something new, it's something different. I figured I might as well take it,” she said. “I'm not ready to not work. I'm not ready to not contribute. I will be, probably, some day. I just don't feel ready to stop.”