A focus on community comes naturally to James Janso, newly appointed Chief of Lloyd Town Police. A lifetime resident of the town he serves, the 30-year veteran of the department has worked his way through the ranks as police officer, investigator, and for the past seven years, lieutenant. He succeeds former Chief Daniel Waage, who retired at the end of January.
Fostering good relations between police and the public is a good idea all around, not only improving the quality of life for local residents but allowing kids to grow up with a positive outlook on police officers. It also helps police do their job, ensuring that when a community member has information they need to know, residents are familiar enough with local officers to be inclined to share.
“We want people to feel comfortable with us, and when they do, they talk about what they see and what they hear,” says the new chief. “And our stats have gone up because of that, because now they feel like, ‘I know Jim Janso, I know Phil Roloson personally.’ And just a little bit of information can go a long way.”
The department’s Youth Rec League was started in part to get kids off their devices and interacting with each other doing sports, but it also allows them to normalize their relationship with police officers as one of mutual respect. Now when the routine walk-throughs at the schools take place, there are no longer heads turning, Janso notes, with students wondering what’s wrong. “It’s become normal to see us. They know that we’re a person first and a cop second.”
Janso says it’s been a bit of a pet peeve for him over the years to have situations in which a parent will point him out as a police officer to their child, warning them to “be good” or they’ll be taken away. “That’s not our job! We don’t take kids away, so don’t scare them. It’s important to get the kids involved with us. We want them to know that we’re there to help them and they can come to us, so when they see a police officer, they’re not going to be scared.”
The chief still lives on the same road in Highland he grew up on, two doors down from the house where his parents still live, now in their 80s. “I take a walk down and visit them a couple times a week, make sure they’re behaving! I want them to know I’m there, and I didn’t forget them. They raised me to be the person I wanted to be, and I am. So hopefully they’re proud of me.”
And living in town hasn’t hurt his career, Janso says. “It’s a unique kind of Americana, I think, to live and work in a town where you know everybody. People that knew me growing up know what my job is, and don’t make my job any harder than it has to be. Business is business; personal is personal. If that individual is making choices to do something, it’s not my choice and I may have to do something they might not like. And that’s always worked. I try to treat people the same way I want my family treated if they got stopped, or they had a complaint. There are people out there who aren’t very nice, but for the majority of the population, it’s very important that they’re treated fairly.”
Married to his wife Giulia for eight years come September, Janso has three children he says he’s very proud of. “I love my job, but I love my family even more.” Oldest daughter Cassidy is a 21-year-old college student in Plattsburgh studying to become a teacher, with five-year-old daughter, Giovanna, and three-year-old son, James, at home.
“So I’m not going to be retiring any time soon!” Janso says with a smile. “James is what my mom would probably consider, ‘a mini-me.’ As a kid, I was always climbing trees and getting into everything, so he’s taking right after me, I guess.”
Highland is “a good community to be in, to live in and work in,” he adds. “But I also love the job, too, because the world is getting crazy, and I want to make sure it’s safer for my family and our community. When my younger kids start going to school and growing up, maybe whatever change I can do now will be there when they get older.”
Thirty years of service
James Janso got into police work after initially planning to go into law enforcement for the U.S. Coast Guard. But after a recruiter told him he’d have to commit to ten years or more and even then, would not be certain of assignment where he wanted to be, Janso took a friend’s recommendation and applied for a full-time position as a corrections officer for the Ulster County Sheriff’s Department. “I did that at the early age of 19, right out of high school,” he says. “I worked nights at the jail, went to college during the day, and when I got the opportunity, took the test for the deputy sheriff’s road patrol.”
Janso worked in that capacity for six months until there was an opening with Town of Lloyd Police in 1990. “The Sheriff’s Department was a great place to work and was a great starting step for me, but my roots were here and I wanted to come back home. And I’ve been here ever since.”
Keeping up with technology is a major factor in police work today, as it is in most fields, of course. “The days of the 1990s are over,” Janso notes. “Different technologies are upgraded as the years go by, and you really have to keep moving ahead in today’s world.”
One of the new data-driven initiatives he’s instigated in order to increase local safety has been signing Town of Lloyd Police on to use a collision report database called CrashLogic, which pinpoints high-incident areas where police can target their efforts to reduce accidents. “The program takes all the data from accidents — time of day, weather conditions, speed — and breaks it down to tell you whatever you need to know to zero in and gear your enforcement toward that. It’s a work in progress; you’re not going to know [if it helps] until months later, maybe a year, but we’re going to see if it can help curtail accidents and injuries. That’s what we’re here for.”
The program also generates a bit of income for the town, as reports may be accessed and purchased by the public online, with the town receiving a small fee for each requested report.
Janso has also initiated a new continuing education program for his officers. In addition to the mandated hands-on training a police officer undertakes, Town of Lloyd Police officers are now required to take monthly online courses on topics such as defensive driving or workplace violence; courses that Janso himself takes, too. And as a former fireman in the town (for three years), the chief recently met with the Highland Fire Company chief to plan cross-training for members of both departments.
The Town of Lloyd’s location between the cities of Newburgh and Kingston and across the river from Poughkeepsie means that “the big things will always come through Highland at one point or another,” Janso says. “It’s a never-ending battle. If there’s a shooting in Poughkeepsie or Newburgh, there’s a good chance they’re coming through here, or they were here. And narcotics brings in a lot of stuff with it; robberies, gangs. So we’re tasked with that. I’m not trying to scare anybody, but it’s a fact, and it is what it is.”
The Town of Lloyd’s location also means that they’re a hub for overdoses, he adds, noting that while the population is small, there are 1.2 million vehicles crossing the Mid-Hudson Bridge every month. “And that’s not even counting the people driving north and south through town on Route 9W. It’s a lot of people you’re responsible for coming through, and a lot of enforcement.”
The Town of Lloyd had 16 overdoses in 2018 (one fatal) and six overdoses in 2019, with one fatal. In an effort to curtail that, Chief Janso has increased patrols that target where drug activity is happening. “Unfortunately, when they buy the product in Poughkeepsie, they come across the bridge and the first thing they want to do is find a place to stop and use. So we’ve used the stats on where our overdoses have been the past two years — the gas stations, parking lots, hotels — and we have officers doing frequent walk-throughs of these establishments. And they’re not going to know when we stop in. We started the program February 12, and we’ve done 140 walk-throughs of the gas stations and convenience stores since then.”
It’s always better to “keep up than catch up,” as he puts it. “It’s actually old-school policing, and a policy that usually works. Nip the small stuff in the bud early and the big problems don’t follow.”
Chief Janso also plans to continue offering the Town of Lloyd Civilian Police Academy for local residents interested in learning about what police officers actually do. For a nominal fee — $25 — the once-a-week, eight-week evening courses offer hands-on information. The classes essentially “pull the curtain away from law enforcement,” Janso notes, in the process fostering a real connection between the police and the community they protect.
Classes are taught by experts in their field on topics such as active shooters, narcotics, and what happens in a car stop. (What is the officer thinking about and doing while you’re sitting nervously waiting in your car?)
“Seeing things on the news is okay, but firsthand experience is a learning tool. I’d say 99 percent, if not 100 percent of the people who come to our academy walk away from it happy they did it, and realizing that there’s a lot of work that goes into policing. And you get to know your police department. I think one of the biggest things they take away from the program, and the best thing, is that we are people first. I’m a husband, I’m a dad, I’m a son… I want to go home to my family at the end of the day. We’re not out there looking to hurt anybody; we want to do our job and go home.”
Police officers, unlike most of us, put a vest on each time they start a shift, Janso adds. “And that’s a sobering reminder that I’m wearing this because there’s somebody out there that might want to do harm to me. And you come to terms with that. That’s part of what we do. But this allows people to know we’re not just getting in a car and pulling people over.”
The next session of the academy is slated to begin in April. Visit the police department’s Facebook page for details or call the station at (845) 691-6102.
As chief, Janso oversees approximately 30 people, which includes his lieutenant, sergeants, detectives, patrol and three full-time dispatchers along with part-time staff. And now that he’s been promoted, he needs to hire a new lieutenant, whose job it is to help run daily operations. “Hopefully we do that soon; the community deserves to have their department up and running with a full staff. And we need it, too. We’re busy, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.”
Even in his 30 years of policing, Janso says, “You’re bound to see a few things here and there that still surprise you. We rely on resources like the State Police and the Sheriff’s Department to help us out on major scenes, but we handle everything that comes our way, from a barking dog to an armed robbery. And unfortunately, nobody calls police just to say ‘hi’ or have a cup of coffee. They want you to solve a problem; they want you to be a lawyer, a doctor, a priest, a social worker. So you’ve got to kind of wear many hats. But it’s really like the front row to ‘The Greatest Show on Earth’: you see it all.”
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