OPINION: What Sort of a New Police Station?

How about a radical idea: a police station that serves two or more towns?

Dedham is at the .

So this is the ideal time to study how a shared police station or even a shared police and fire station might happen.

Shared headquarters for local police forces are – at least right now – heresy. New England is composed of individual communities that act independently on public safety along with public schools, town operations, snow removal, street repairs, health, retirement and the like. So breaking the mold and trying a multi-town police department will require re-educating the populace in both the towns involved.

Still, many top-ranking municipal officials have talked about the shared police departments as money savers and a way to save on big ticket items like radio systems and consolidated cell space.

Would a Dedham-Needham Police Department make sense; or a Dedham-Norwood Police Department, or a Dedham-Canton Police Department or possibly a Dedham-Hyde Park Police station or any other permutation?

Maybe; but the Dedham meeting on a new Dedham police station has not brought this item up for discussion.

Under consideration at the latest meeting was the former St. Mary’s Church parking lot on High Street that is town owned. Other locations have been considered. Among them are Striar Property, a field at , a field at the , a parking lot near on Eastern Avenue, the former and the MBTA Readville Yard 5.

Members of the Dedham Building, Planning and Construction Committee are really in the earliest phases of picking a new police station, they insist. Nothing is definite.

Still neighbors of the St. Mary's property are moving full throttle to derail it.

This is to be expected. Nobody wants a central police station in their neighborhood.

Nonetheless, the new station will go into some existing arrangement of businesses and homes and will inevitably cause change wherever it lands.

All that change will bring plenty of battling.

Will that war include the multi-town campaign?

This is a huge, unanswered question.

Building, Planning and Construction Committee members must quickly tie down the question of whether this is a Dedham station or a multi-community station.

And they need to settle that question immediately.

Any group of resistant neighbors will scream foul if the town waits to announce that the new police station is multi-town.

Also concerned will be the town's officers, radio operators, dispatch procedures and all the other labor adjustments the two towns would have to settle.

For those who want a multi-town station, the placement might be important, and the backers might have a totally different idea of where it should go.

All these considerations need to be addressed now, at the beginning of the process.

Some clear direction needs to come from the BPCC before the town can proceed.

Whose police station will it be?