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03/08/2017 07:30 AMKillingworth may seem like a nice, quiet place to work in law enforcement, but the town’s new resident state trooper, Scott Wisner, isn’t relaxing.
“Even in the nicest, most quiet communities,” he says, “stuff happens.”
Scott knows stuff. He took this job after a 12-year stint as a Connecticut State Police detective working major crimes, and four years ago, he suffered gunshot wounds and responded with deadly force in the course of an arrest.
But Scott also has experience in the role of a small-town resident trooper: From 1996 to 2005, he held the job in Essex, where he worked with a group of full-time constables.
In Killingworth, Scott is essentially a one-man police department, although he’s backed up by state troopers based in Westbrook when he’s not on duty.
“Killingworth,” he says, “for the most part, is a low-crime town. With that said, when you’re a one-man show, you’re kind of dealing with a lot of stuff going on. There’s a lot of administrative stuff, and there’s always putting out the proverbial brush fires.
“You definitely want to be one-up if something starts,” he says. “You know, you never get just one burglary or one car break-in. When you get one, get ready, because you’re gonna have a whole bunch.”
In Killingworth, Scott says, “there’s the usual blend of larcenies, burglaries, thefts from motor vehicles. For the most part we stay on top of stuff, and when we discover that it is the work of one person or a group of people, we’re able to get on it pretty quick.”
Those crimes, Scott says, are “generally driven by substance abuse for the most part. I can’t even think of something recently that hasn’t been heroin-driven.”
As for crimes committed by outsiders, Scott says, “sometimes towns like this do get targeted because they figure out that there’s not a huge police presence. We have one bank in this town, and it’s been robbed quite a few times over the last 10 years, but the common thread in that is each and every time it’s been robbed, we’ve caught the people who’ve done it. The last time it was robbed, the person was caught the next day.
“So for the most part, we can’t always prevent that stuff from happening, but all we can do is try to keep, you know, your part of the state cleaned up. That’s the best you can do.”
Scott doesn’t spend all his time on crime.
“A huge part of what you’re doing in a town like this is public relations,” he says. “And a lot of it is, even when you’re having a really busy day, when someone comes in, I always keep in mind that that might be the biggest thing on their mind. Their issue—you always keep in mind that it may not be a big deal in the overall scheme of things or whatever I might be working on that minute, but it is to that person.
“You’re always dealing with a lot of community interaction and a steady stream of people coming in and out. Some of it is just social visits; others are neighborhood problems or inquiries or ‘How do I do this?’ or ‘How do I do that?’”
For example, Scott has recently seen a surge in requests for pistol permits.
“With the proposed state budget,” he says, “the fees are going to go up substantially, so everybody and his brother is coming in to look for a pistol permit.”
Scott started working in Killingworth on Dec. 23, 2016, learning the ropes from Matt Ward, who had been the town’s resident state trooper since 2005.
“Matt is on one hand a great show to follow,” Scott says, “because he had left everything in such good shape for me, and on the other hand he’s a difficult show to follow, because he is well entrenched and well liked by the community.
“Matt did a tremendous job here, and just being able to kind of pick up where he left off, he’s made my job at a lot easier.”
Familiar Territory
Scott himself is well entrenched in the area. Born in Hartford, he was raised in the Winthrop section of Deep River, just across the Killingworth town line. His father was an electrical engineer at United Technologies; his mother was a nurse.
After graduating from Valley Regional High School, he worked on the Valley Railroad, a job that he kept while enrolled at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, where he studied business management and finance.
“I was kind of able to pay for college by working at the railroad,” he says.
“At the time,” Scott says, “I had a revelation that I wasn’t going to be able to spend my working career in a cubicle, and also at the time, what made the decision easier was the insurance industry in Connecticut was imploding. I was looking for something a little more adventurous and something that would be challenging, and I certainly found it.”
After graduating from college in 1991, Scott was accepted at the Connecticut Police Academy in Meriden. It was a seven-month-long program that involved living in dorms.
“The state police is a paramilitary organization,” Scott says, “and a lot of the training mirrors that of various service academies or branches of the military.
“You are there very early on Monday morning, and you don’t leave until very late Friday night, and all weekend long you’re not looking forward to going back.”
After the academy, Scott was assigned to patrol duty out of Troop F in Westbrook, covering a large portion of Middlesex County, as well as Lyme and Old Lyme. Then, in 1996, he became the resident state trooper in Essex.
“They have a pretty sizable and competent constabulary,” he says. “They were an excellent group of guys.”
In 2005, he became a detective in major crimes. A self-described “low-profile person,” he prefers not to mention the specific cases he worked on.
One incident, however, put Scott in the headlines. On April 8, 2013, he was driving in an unmarked car on Route 153 in Westbrook, after processing the arrest of a bank robber. It was supposed to have been a day off.
Scott heard on his radio that the Old Saybrook police were pursuing two armed robbers near where he was driving. He pulled over where he thought the chase was heading and, luckily or unluckily, managed to pull ahead of the robbers’ car.
Trying to pass, the robbers rammed Scott’s car. Both cars went off the road, through a guardrail, and into a ditch. The robbers’ car was flipped on its side, with its open sunroof aligned with the driver’s door window of Scott’s car.
Scott was bending forward to retrieve his gun, which had fallen on the floor, when one of the robbers fired four bullets through the sunroof and into Scott’s car. One struck Scott in his left arm, passing through his shoulder; another grazed his left ear.
He returned fire, fatally wounding one of the robbers.
While he was being fired upon, Scott says, “I did think for a fleeting moment that this was not going to work out too well. It is kind of a lonely moment, because you’re in a kind of a swampy ditch, and that’s not a place where you want things to end.”
Scott was helped from his car by fellow troopers as the suspects were being arrested. He was released from the hospital the same day.
Following protocol, Scott was suspended while the state’s attorney supervised the investigation into Scott’s decision to return fire, which was found to be justified.
“I was probably very lucky,” he says, “in the sense that probably the worst decision or toughest decision—despite how TV and the media might portray how easy these decisions are to make—the toughest decision for any law enforcement officer is in a shoot-or-don’t-shoot decision. Because whatever you’re doing in that tenth of a second, you could end up being the next YouTube sensation or the next one with people in front of your house wrongfully protesting what you did.”
What’s more, Scott says, “we’re very lucky that nobody from law enforcement was killed. Most importantly of all, nobody from the public was hurt.”
Asked if he was more nervous or cautious after returning to work, Scott says, “No, not at all. Not the slightest bit.”
The Realities of Police Work
If this were a TV show, Scott would have been assigned the current job in Killingworth because his superiors thought he needed a calmer position after the shooting, but real life is different.
“I wasn’t sent here,” he says. “I put in for it, just because I had been in major crimes for 12 years, and these spots don’t come up all the time.”
Scott has gone through some adjustment in the new job.
“When I last worked patrol, which was 2005,” he says, “we didn’t have any computers in the cars; we didn’t have video recorders in the cars.”
The main difference from his job as the resident trooper in Essex is that he’s on his own, which has its pluses and minuses.
“At the same time that you had this hardworking, great constabulary to assist you,” he says, “you still had to go through a lot of administrative tasks, ordering cruisers, ordering uniforms, doing performance evaluations, dealing with HR. I don’t have any of that here.”
Asked what people should know about his job, Scott says, “It’s not like TV. That’s the best thing I can tell people. It’s not like TV. Everything’s not wrapped up in 52 minutes.”
He says that when giving testimony in court, “you have to be aware of the so-called CSI effect. You have to be able to talk to the jury, but there are jury members that think they really know more than you know about it because they watch TV.”
Another problem is the high recidivism rate.
“It’s kind of frustrating to deal with the same crew of people over and over,” Scott says. “That gets a little discouraging. You know, when you just arrested somebody on a whole pile of charges and six months later they’re out doing the same thing again.”
Then there are the constant budget pressures.
“For 25 years,” Scott says, “the theme has been every year ‘do more with less.’ The state police is still at staffing levels that go back to the early 1970s, and we have a lot more roles and responsibilities than we had in the early 1970s.”
A related issue, Scott says, is “how much of a burden the state is placing on some of these towns. When I left Essex, in 2005, compared to current day, the town is paying quadruple what it did for the services of a resident trooper.”
On the positive side, Scott has an easy commute. He lives in Chester, where he also has an easy walk to the village.
The divorced father of two teenage girls, Scott relaxes by doing carpentry projects around the house, reading history, riding his boat and Jet Ski, and day-tripping in the area.
Scott’s tenure in the state police would allow him to retire now with a pension, but he doesn’t have any clear plans for either retirement or his next job.
“I’m not really thinking a whole lot about that,” he says, “because I just like what I’m doing now. The resident trooper slot, as far as I’m concerned in my years of being in the state police, is the most challenging and the most rewarding position that there is.”