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12/07/2016 07:30 AMIf you ask Captain Joseph Race, the second in command in the Madison Police Department, for a few stories of shootouts with violent perps or death-defying car chases, you’ll be disappointed.
“In any police work,” Joe says, “it’s more paperwork than action, by far.”
That’s even truer both in Madison and in Joe’s work here. Paperwork has largely been his way of helping to restore the department’s reputation and its ties to the community.
When Joe, a former Marine and lawyer, joined the force back in 2009, the Madison Police Department was still trying to regain the trust of the town after a series of scandals and crimes involving members of the department, which Joe sums up with “the lobsters and hookers and drugs and all that terrible, terrible past.”
He says that at his job interview, “I was like, ‘I want to be one of those voices that gets us back into the community, and I want to start building those relationships.’”
Joe has headed the department’s efforts to be certified by the Commission on Accreditation for Law Enforcement Agencies, or CALEA, an arduous process that involves examining a long list of police procedures and ensuring they meet the commission’s exacting standards.
The department received accreditation for law enforcement in spring 2014. Part of the process was a public hearing held in Madison by representatives of CALEA.
“It was packed,” says Joe. “It was standing room only. It was people from the Board of Ed and the Board of Selectmen and the Board of Finance, and different commissions, and town employees. And residents came out to speak to the commissioners and say what a great job we were doing as a police department, which was amazing.”
With that accreditation, Joe says, “we kind of closed that chapter on the trouble of our past.”
The department is currently applying for a renewal of its CALEA accreditation as well as its first accreditation in communications.
“Less than one-third of one percent of law enforcement in the country hold that dual-accreditations distinction,” says Joe.
Representatives of CALEA will attend another public hearing this Monday, Dec. 12, at 6 p.m. in the Madison Police Department Community Room. “We’re hoping for the same turnout,” says Joe.
(See “Madison Police Department Goes for Accreditation” on page 15)
Even during the Madison police’s most dramatic recent incident, Joe’s attention was turned to the public. On Oct. 7, when word reached Joe that the police were pursuing a fugitive in the woods in North Madison, he was taking the day off in Hamden, where he lives.
After heading to town, he says, “I just did the public-information piece and helped with logistics where I could. I tried to go at least once an hour to give the media an update, even if it was nothing.
“The Madison Police Department does not release booking photos,” he says, “so the only photo they were going to get of this individual was when we were putting him in the car, so I might have let them know that it was…I said, ‘If you’re still here in a few minutes, you might see something.’”
Joe learned the way the police deal with the public firsthand. His father was the chief of police in the village of Summit, Wisconsin, next door to Joe’s home town, Dousman.
“Way back, it was called Bullfrog Station,” he says. “They have the state frog-jumping championships there.”
Right after graduating from high school, in 1995, Joe enlisted in the Marines. He was 17. He was worried about the cost of college, and, he says, “I needed some growing up.”
He definitely needed some growing out.
“When I got to boot camp,” Joe says, “I was 5 foot 8 and about 115 pounds. They actually put me on double rations at boot camp, and at one point they asked if they could put me on triple rations.
“I had a drill sergeant that pushed me very hard because I was so small,” he says. “But the one thing I think I’ve always had is the mental strength. In different interviews, you’re asked, ‘What’s your strength?’ Mine, I believe, is my work ethic. I’m not the smartest, I’m not the fastest, but you’re not going to outwork me.”
Joe settled in quickly to Marine life.
“It was great,” he says, “because for four years, I got to be a big kid. I drove an M1A1 tank.”
Although Joe’s four years in the Marines came during a relatively peaceful period in world affairs, he was shipped overseas in 1998.
“Saddam Hussein started moving his troops toward Kuwait again,” he says. “We just played around on the Kuwaiti-Iraqi border for a few weeks. We did a lot of fire exercises, just showing Mr. Hussein what we had, if we had to do things.”
By the end of his four-year stint, Joe had been promoted to sergeant.
“I was looking into becoming an officer,” he says, “and I wanted to fly, because, you know, I’ve seen Top Gun.”
Unfortunately, there was no guarantee that he wouldn’t wind up going into the infantry or even working in the mess hall, so he returned to civilian life.
That decision came to haunt him in 2003.
“When we went back into Iraq,” he says, “I had so many mixed emotions on that. I think it was kind of a guilt that I’m not there with the people I trained with. It was actually pretty tough to deal with for a while.”
While still at Camp Lejeune, in North Carolina, Joe was introduced by a friend’s fiancée to his future wife, Jamie Strohl.
“We just hit it off that night,” says Joe.
“About two weeks later,” he says, “I invited her back down to North Carolina, and I flew her down there, actually for her birthday. Then I went up to Pennsylvania, where she was from. I was going to spend a couple of days, and I ended up staying with her and her grandparents for like a month.”
Joe, who had earned an associate’s degree while in the Marines, invited Jamie to join him in Minnesota, where he would finish college at Winona State University.
After Joe’s graduation, the couple wanted to relocate to the East Coast. Joe applied to law schools in Massachusetts and Connecticut.
“My LSAT score was not great,” he says. “It was the first time I froze up on a test. I sat down for it, and kind of the whole world flashed in front of my eyes, and I choked a little bit. But I mean it was good enough to get me into Quinnipiac, which was fantastic.”
After passing the bar exam in Connecticut and New York, Joe worked for a law firm in Stratford, focusing on aviation law, then set up his own shop.
“That wasn’t going well,” he says. “I started doing temp work in New York, and that’s how I got actually into legal recruiting in Manhattan.”
But like many fields, recruiting was being undercut by the Internet, and the legal business was being devastated by the recession.
Joe says, “I kind of said to my wife that I need to look at the family business. I need to look at law enforcement.”
Joe had a good first interview in Madison, fortunately.
“I interviewed here on a Wednesday,” he says, “and I was laid off on Friday in New York.”
Joe read up on the Madison police’s troubles.
“By the time I got to my final interview,” he says, “they said, ‘Why here? Why now?’
“My quote in 2009 was ‘It can’t get any worse, can it?’”
Nonetheless, he was hired.
Thanks in part to all of the turnover caused by the department’s legal troubles, Joe has served longer in Madison than nearly all of his colleagues, including his only superior, Chief Jack Drumm, although he points out that many of his colleagues have years of experience with other law-enforcement agencies
Joe seized opportunities when he saw them.
“In 2012, when Captain [Jon] Pardo was about to retire, I took over training, because I’d done training for my unit in the Marines.”
Like CALEA, that job involves a lot of paperwork.
“Training is really an organizational tool,” Joe says. “It’s keeping everyone certified.”
Joe also volunteered to work on the department’s CALEA application. He didn’t have a lot of competition.
He says, “If you went over to patrol and asked, ‘Hey, who wants to be the next accreditation manager?’ people are going to run out that door.’”
But that experience helped when he took the examination for promotion to sergeant, a rank for which union rules demand five years of experience.
“When they asked questions about policies,” he says, “I literally wrote most of them. If I hadn’t written them, I’d finessed them and tweaked them.”
The next step up would usually be lieutenant, a job that also falls under union rules.
“You have to have three years as a sergeant to be a lieutenant per our contract,” says Joe. “But captain’s nonunion, so the chief could set the requirements.”
When Commander John Rich left the Madison force to become police chief in Ledyard in late 2015, the department decided to divide his duties between a lieutenant and a captain. This February, after only about 16 months as sergeant, Joe took the latter job.
“Did I ever imagine it this fast?” says Joe. “No, not in a million years did I ever imagine I’d be sitting here as a captain with less than eight years on the job. It was very fast, scary fast.”
Joe takes his relative lack of experience into account when dealing with his colleagues.
“I’m not going to say you have to do it this way just because I’m the captain,” he says. “My attitude is everyone has something to teach you.”
Joe’s job, he says, involves “administrative, including dispatch, records, IT, training, public information, accreditation. So I do pretty much everything administrative, and then Lieutenant [Richard] Perron does all the operations stuff. He oversees patrol, but everything short of that is me.”
Joe has developed a checklist designed to save officers the trouble of typing out all the details of an arrest. It has started to be adopted by police departments in other towns.
“I will say some people have improved it,” he says. “I’m more than happy to share it, because I think that’s how we’re all going to make everybody better. I have an idea, you have an idea, let’s work together.”
Although he’s currently wound up in the CALEA process, Joe takes time to volunteer. He is helping out with the police department’s holiday toy and food drives.
He served as a coach for the Special Olympics and is on the Law Enforcement Torch Run Council Committee. Relay teams of law-enforcement personnel carry three different torches to the site of the Special Olympics.
After the cauldron is lit, Joe says, “all the police officers, wearing our torch-run shirts, line all the way up each side going into the main gate, so as the athletes come through, it’s a wall of high fives, and the smiles and just the gratitude that they show is amazing.”
Joe has participated in Spartan obstacle-course races, including a so-called Beast, which involved climbing and descending Killington Mountain, in Vermont, four times. It took Joe nearly nine hours.
“Every part of the body was breaking down, which is awesome,” he says. “It’s an amazing feeling to get to that point and then to finish, but I don’t think I need to do that again.”
Joe says he might try to run the Marine Corps Marathon, in Washington, D.C. Unfortunately, since he’s no longer on active duty, he would have to enter the lottery like everyone else.
When this round of CALEA accreditation is over, he hopes to travel somewhere warm with his wife.
He and Jamie share their home with a French bulldog and an English bulldog.
“They are our babies,” says Joe.
Joe admits that his career path has been unusual, but he believes that his military and legal background are essential to his success. Law school, he says, taught him to pay attention to detail and to be able to read complicated texts for hours on end. Still a member of the bar association, Joe says he keeps up on laws that could affect police procedures.
The Marines, Joe says, gave him a “mission-accomplishment-type mentality. I’m definitely goal oriented. If this means I’m going to stay here ‘til 2 a.m., I’m gonna get it done.”
The Madison Police Department, he says, “is by far the best place I’ve ever worked. These are some of the best cops in the state, probably in the country.”
The low violent-crime rate is a plus.
“It’s a place where my wife is comfortable with me working,” he says. “That’s a big thing.”
Joe hopes to move to town eventually.
“Madison has some of the nicest people ever,” he says. “I’ve always said that when I started working here, I kind of took ownership. This became my town.”
He remembers driving through downtown Madison with his wife when they first came east.
“My wife said, ‘I’d like to live here someday,’” he says. “At the time I didn’t even know where we were really. And when I got hired, I was like, ‘You remember in 2002, when we drove through town?’
“I guess it was meant to be.”
To nominate a Person of the Week, contact Tom Conroy at t.conroy@Zip06.com.