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01/16/2019 07:30 AMWith lessons learned in North Haven, Lieutenant Joseph Murgo helps to tell the East Haven Police Department’s news in a changing world as its public information officer.
Joe became a police officer because “he wanted to do something for somebody” and because of the guidance he received from relatives in New Haven law enforcement, he says. In 2003, he took his first job as a police officer when he joined the force in East Haven.
“Human nature always interested me. I always wanted to learn why people do the things they do,” he says.
That interest, Joe says, took root when his guidance counselor suggested he join the North Haven High School Peer Mediation Program.
“The Peer Mediation program allowed us to intervene in minor issues regarding other students who were in disputes or who found themselves in other types of disciplinary situations,” Joe says.
He quickly became the president of the organization. Finding positive solutions set him up for the work he would do as a police officer.
Today, Joe is the leader of the local Crisis Intervention Team (CIT) and a hostage negotiator for the regional SWAT team.
Joe says he’s always learning more about human nature and policing through his job.
“There’s always ongoing training throughout your whole career,” Joe says. “[To start] I took a hostage negotiation course put on by the FBI in 2007.”
As far as the CIT goes, Joe says the most important thing is de-escalation: finding ways to turn a potentially dangerous situation into peaceful situation, hopefully leading to fewer arrests.
“You want to be able to take someone’s emotions and bring them down to think rationally about a situation,” he says. “[Then], they’re able to come up with better solutions and make better decisions…for them as a civilian and the officer who’s dealing with the situation.”
Learning to de-escalate situations has helped Joe and the other officers of the EHPD solve problems in town, dealing both with suspects and onlookers.
“To be able to not have to resort to using force…that’s huge in today’s society,” Joe says.
Joe says these same principals are important to his work as a SWAT team hostage negotiator, where he often deals with suicidal persons or barricaded subjects.
Trying to de-escalate a dangerous situation so the SWAT team won’t have to go in and use force is a stressful part of the job.
“A successful hostage negotiator is able to build a good rapport with a complete stranger in as fast a time as possible,” Joe says.
The new emphasis on de-escalation has coincided with advances in police and civilian technology like body-cameras and smart phones, leading to increased police visibility and a national effort by police departments to improve public perception.
For the last three years, Joe has also been the EHPD’s public information officer, a position that, like policing as a whole, has had to evolve. In addition to communicating with the press and the public at large, Joe is also mostly responsible for managing the department’s social media.
It might be new to policing, but not to Joe. He started the “You’re probably from North Haven, CT if…” Facebook page in 2011 as a way to reminisce with his friends. It’s since evolved to offer public safety information, current events, and town-wide advertising.
“People from North Haven say they love it because it brings them back to their child hood and it has been responsible for re-connecting people who have lost touch with each other over the years,” he says.
In some ways, it’s like what he does now for the EHPD’s page.
“I think it’s important to humanize the badge. I think it’s important for the general public to see the raw emotion that goes on any given call,” Joe says. “The perception of police as a whole has recently been negative.”
In addition to alerting the public of dangers and performing in the notorious lip-sync battles of summer 2018, Joe often posts bodycam footage of police officers doing their jobs on the department Facebook page.
“An overwhelming majority of the time, an officer does everything in his power to de-escalate the situation,” Joe says. “Prior to the body cams, dash cams, I guess it didn’t seem like that.”
The videos, Joe says, are a powerful tool to tell the whole story of an officer making a split decision.
“That’s why we find so much value in Facebook…We’re able to control the content, we’re able to release the information exactly the way it happened,” Joe says. “Facebook is kind of an equalizer.”
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