With a growing population and more complex calls, officials from Plymouth’s police and fire departments advocated for more personnel and stations to reduce response time and address work hours at the Jan. 29 Select Board meeting.
Increasing staff and building enough new police and fire stations to minimize response times across Plymouth’s 134 square miles would be a long-term, expensive undertaking. For now, the Select Board and departments are considering building a new, joint station for both departments, but that project is in the early stages of development.
The town’s growth has increased demands on the police department, which has a staffing limit of 128 officers but currently employs 112.
According to the FBI, the national average number of sworn officers per 1,000 residents was 2.4 in 2024. Based on Plymouth’s 2024 census, the town had 1.7 officers per 1,000 residents. A full staff of 128 would still only provide 1.9 officers per 1,000 residents. The staffing limit would need to increase to 154 officers to reach the national average.
The police department said it has to spread limited staff over a land area larger than that of any other town in the county. Police Chief Dana Flynn said that one officer is assigned to patrol an area greater than the whole town of Brockton.
Police officers spent 16,166 hours on the ground responding to calls for service in 2025, up from 14,002 in 2023. Most of those calls were from residents, but “a good portion” were self-initiated by officers.
Flynn said one factor in the increasing man hours is the youth of his police force, since newer officers take longer to respond to calls. Police departments have also been given more obligations under Massachusetts General Law in recent years, including maintaining co-response and diversion programs.
“The calls for service we go to now are more involved. Our offices are much younger,” Flynn said. “It takes them a lot longer to work through calls, so they're not able to self-initiate as much as we have in the past.”
Meanwhile, Fire Chief Neil Foley said calls for service to the fire department have nearly doubled since 2015, and they increased by 20% from 2025 to 2026.
The number of hours worked by fire department employees in 2025 increased by 14% from 2023. Foley estimated that it will increase another 35% by 2030.
The bottom line, according to the chiefs: their departments need more employees to address Plymouth’s growing and complex needs.
“The smaller crew size leads to more tasks on the fire ground… which obviously is going to delay our ability to get that fire under control, make a rescue, save lives and conserve property,” Foley said. “So it is an investment, but I think it's an investment that is worthy.”
Just over a quarter of Plymouth residents are over the age of 65, which makes fire department work more complicated. Those over 65 are twice as likely to be injured or killed in fire emergencies, Foley said.
Another point of complexity is the makeup of modern buildings. Foley gave the example of lithium-ion fires, which take longer to contain and require a more intense disposal process than wood-burning fires, becoming more common in the last decade.
"That's just one of the many things that have been introduced to the fire service in the past 10, 15 years that has become more commonplace,” Foley said. “It's not uncommon for us to respond to a lithium-ion fire two to three times a week at this point.”
The average police response time in 2025 was just over five minutes, an increase of nearly 16% since 2023, which Flynn attributed mainly to worsened traffic conditions due to population growth.
The National Fire Protection Association states that fire departments should respond to calls in four minutes or less, but that is impossible given the large swaths of less populated areas that have no fire stations.
The police department, too, has “maximized the use of the available space” in its headquarters, per the chiefs’ presentation, so significant staff increases would require new space.
“I understand that the police station is pretty much bursting at the seams already, and you're already understaffed,” Select Board Member Kevin Canty said to Flynn.
Both chiefs had previously expressed to the Select Board their needs for new stations, and the Select Board pitched the idea of building a joint fire and police station that would serve as the police headquarters.
The police and fire departments are in talks about what services the new joint station should support, and plan to put out an RFP for a designer after those talks are complete.
There are no designs for the potential station, nor are there any cost or timeline estimates at this time.
“You've made a compelling case for why the community needs these additional infrastructure improvements to meet the needs of a growing, aging population,” Canty said to the chiefs.
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