To the Editor:
Having read the article that you published quoting Sara Curtis’ remarks at the most recent Board of Selectmen’s meeting about the great work of various Wilton town departments and mindful also of Ms. Curtis’ invitation to others to follow suit in describing their good experiences with town agencies and departments, I enclose the letter by Wi-Act [Wilton Interfaith Action Committee] to support the Wilton Police Department’s recent [U.S. Department of Justice Community Oriented Policing Services] grant application respecting its community policing work. This letter describes the many ways in which the Wilton Police Department has been supportive of the work of Wi-Act and Wi-Act’s deep appreciation of that support:
Dear Grant Review Committee,
I am writing on behalf of Wi-Act’s Steering Committee (the 38-member governing board of Wi-Act) in strong support of the request by the Wilton Police Department for a Community Oriented Policing Services grant award. By way of background, Wi-Act is the acronym for the Wilton Interfaith Action Committee composed of and led by the lay congregants of 11 Wilton faith institutions: Christian, Hindu, Jewish, and Muslim. I can report that the Wilton Police Department and its officers are very actively engaged in support of our community in many ways that we at Wi-Act have seen and have appreciated very much over multiple years. I will offer here four examples of the Department’s work that specifically intersects with Wi-Act:
1. Wi-Act holds every year a special meal-packaging event that is a major activity in Wilton participated in by upwards of 650 people each year. The program consists of packaging in one (long!) day between 135,000 and 150,000 meals using equipment and bulk supplies provided by the highly rated nonprofit Rise Against Hunger, Inc. with the cost of the bulk supplies paid for by Wi-Act. The meals go wherever in the world the need is greatest at the time of the event. They feed children in educational settings where the children can be nourished in mind as well as in body. The meals have gone to Haiti, the Philippines, Central America, Sub-Sahara Africa, and even Vietnam over the dozen years that Wi-Act has been conducting this event. Throughout that time, the Wilton Police Department’s officers have been involved, off-duty, in helping to package meals. One of those officers, Lt. Anna Tornello, has also used her outstanding operatic soprano talents to put on a benefit concert for the fundraising for Wi-Act that helps make it possible for Wi-Act to pay for the bulk ingredients that are packaged by all of those volunteers on that day. She’s done those volunteer concerts over multiple years.
2. In addition to doing meal packaging, Wi-Act also does refugee resettlement with several different refugee families over the last dozen years. One family of four was that of an interpreter for the U.S. Army in Iraq who was in danger of losing his life if he stayed in Iraq. A second family consists of a widowed Syrian mother and her five children. The third family is that of a Ukrainian mother and her 10-year-old son who fled from the war there; the mother suffers from cystic fibrosis and was in danger of dying if she could not receive the kind of advanced treatment available here in the U.S. (which was provided pro bono by a Stamford clinic affiliated with Wi-Act and run by a physician member of Wi-Act’s Steering Committee who is a nationally recognized pediatric pulmonologist). In the case of the Syrian refugee family, the family had to flee the country when Assad’s police ransacked their home and hauled away their grandfather. The grandfather’s widowed daughter, the mother with five young children including a very young baby (held in her arms as they fled and with another young child clinging to her back), had to trek on foot for two weeks through war-torn Syria to the Jordanian border where they went into refugee status. Consequently, the family was very traumatized by police action. The Wilton Police Department rapidly and very positively moved to address the situation by bringing, with our foreknowledge and careful advanced planning, two squad cars to the family home with the police officers socializing with the family and letting the kids sit in the cruisers and have a lot of fun in the process. The Wilton Police Department invited the Wilton Fire Department to join in, and it brought two firetrucks. The result brought many neighborhood kids to the scene also and allowed the children in the family to get to know them better in a very welcoming setting. This incredibly thoughtful act changed the entire family’s perception of, and experience with, police — helping to make “protect and serve” a very definite reality for them here in America. In fact, the child who is now an 11th grader in Wilton High School (and doing very well there) but was a third-grader then, wants to pursue a career in police work and has had that desire ever since he interacted with Wilton police officers that day. Officers have also taken the time to visit with the family on other occasions, and to provide them various household items that would help them as they began their new life in America and specifically here in Wilton.
3. School Resource Officers Christopher Ventura and Elise Ackerman of the Wilton Police Department have not only provided safety to our children in the Wilton Public Schools but also take the time to interact with students on a regular basis to be accessible and helpful to them. The specifics of these interactions, quite wide in range, are things which I and Donya Sadeghi, the member of Wi-Act’s Steering Committee who is our Education Subcommittee Chair and who interfaces with our schools regularly on behalf of these families, have had occasion to observe in multiple different settings and I’m sure extend well beyond what we’ve seen — but of course we cannot know that because of student confidentiality. However, from the “tip of the iceberg” that we have seen, it is very evident that these officers go out of their way to make sure that students not only feel safe and are safe but also have community-building police support in other ways as well.
4. The Wilton Police Department regularly holds sessions called “Coffee with a Cop” in which a half-dozen or so officers go to one of the coffee shops in town and meet with any resident who would like to speak with them. Many residents come to have very helpful interaction with our police officers in this warm and friendly setting. This is a really effective community-building service and reflects the extent to which the Department goes out of its way to make the community feel what it in fact is: not only a crucially important safety resource but also a supportive organization for our community in every way that a police department can be.
Wi-Act strongly supports the Wilton Police Department’s request for award of this grant.
Sincerely,
Stephen M. Hudspeth
Chair, Wi-Act