The Morning Journal (Lorain, OH)
Police chief emphasizes using restraint
The best word to describe the Amherst Police Department’s style of policing seems to be restraint.
Or, at least it seems that way when one speaks to Chief Joseph K. Kucirek.
Kucirek, 50, of Amherst, has been with the department for 29 years and has been chief since 2011.
He said he was drawn to law enforcement
having known police officers as he was growing up and around the time he applied, but he almost went into a different form of public service.
“Back in the late ’80s, I was either going to do this, or apply for an air traffic controller job,” Kucirek said. “I was set to take (the air traffic controller) test and I took the civil service test for the city and before my test for the air traffic controller came up, the civil service results came in and I was offered a job.”
Despite the seemingly serendipitous circumstances, Kucirek said he doesn’t think of the road untraveled.
In Kucirek’s view, the role of police in Amherst is like the role of law enforcement across the country.
“(The job of police) is what it’s always been traditionally; to protect and serve, to answer calls for service, to help people who are in need and to seek out the criminal element and hold them accountable for their actions,” he said.
According to Kucirek, the department puts a lot of focus on exercising restraint in their interactions with the community.
“We focus on having competent people and having a good sense of when they need to ‘pour it on’ and when they need to ‘pull it back,’ ” he said. “In other words, not every time that somebody challenges you do you have to challenge them back, but there are other times when people challenge you and you need to up the game and not only challenge them, but you need to win the confrontation.
“There’s a lot of conversations across the country about police brutality and these kinds of things and it really comes down to compliance or lack of compliance,” Kucirek continued. “Every use of force that has been in the media, the contributing factor to that was lack of compliance on the
citizen’s part.”
He said these days some people just want to challenge the police’s authority. He said this desire is part of society’s change in culture in recent years.
“So, we pride ourselves on striking that balance,” he said. “I think the community here respects us; they like us. Obviously we have that certain segment of society that hates you no matter what because of the uniform that you wear and what you stand for, but overall I think the community supports us and I think they support us because we show the community that we’re reasonable.”
It is this same sense of restraint that the department is bringing to their responding to calls of people overdosing on drugs, Kucirek said. Officers with the department have carried the anti-overdose drug naloxone since 2014.
According to Kucirek, he gave a speech to a rotary club about a year ago that focused on an often overlooked side effect of officers rushing to the scene to administer the life-saving drug.
“One of the by-products of the naloxone, heroin overdose epidemic is the danger that it creates
to other people in the society,” he said. “The emergency vehicles that are responding to get to these individuals, they’re obviously responding with lights and sirens and probably breaking the speed limits, but how many times have you heard of somebody not hearing a police car or siren or an ambulance and there being an accident and, worst case scenario, somebody losing a life?”
Kucirek said the department is forced to balance how many lives they are risking while responding to save one life.
“If we were responding to a baby at the bottom of a pool, or somebody choking, or somebody who collapsed from a heart attack and an accident happened between a police car and another person and the person was injured or, god forbid, even worse, what would the public perception be,” he said.
“You change that scenario to the police responding a heroin overdose, or another heroin overdose, or the same person that overdosed two or three times does that change the public’s perception,” he said. “It really becomes a matter of the public’s perception and what do they want.”