school for new quarters
in renovated rug mill
Department leaves former
school for new quarters
in renovated rug mill
By clare MARie celano
Staff Writer
FREEHOLD — Borough police officers are finally operating from their new location at the Rug Mill Towers on Jackson Street — honest.
For one reason or another — equipment problems, contracting delays and just bad timing — target dates for the police department’s move have come and gone, but as of Friday all of that is behind the department.
The police department moved out of its headquarters at the corner of Hudson and Bennett streets, leaving a building that was once the Bennett Street School. The police department called the building home for about 25 years.
Borough officials are in the process of determining what to do with the now vacant Bennett Street building.
Moving day for a police department carries the same stress and problems that moving residential locations bring with it — but with a bunch of additional ones.
However, moving things like guns, ammunition and homicide evidence may just cause a bit more unease and frustration then the average move from one home to another.
Friday’s move saw officers and staff loading up equipment at the Bennett Street location and unloading the goods at the Rug Mill Towers. Crushing cardboard and plastic foam packaging, officers continued moving the contents of one department into another, as the day-to-day business of police operations was carried out around them.
Police Capt. Michael DiAiso said he hoped the department would be operating completely out of its new location by the afternoon.
A quick tour of the new police headquarters revealed that even though, yes, there is a lot more to be done, the new building is large, open and modern when stacked up against its counterpart on Bennett Street.
This new space is not much larger in square footage than the old one, according to DiAiso, who explained that the space in the new building is better used.
"This building was designed for modern use, not for school use," the captain said. "This building has much more usable space and much more room for storage."
The 15,000-square-foot area is on the first floor of what was once the Karagheusian rug mill, now renovated into the Rug Mill Towers complex at Center and Jackson streets.
The new building has an entry foyer with the police department to the left and the municipal courtroom to the right. A records and dispatch window will be directly in front of people walking into the building. This area ends the public access area, according to the captain. Besides the access to the court clerk and rest rooms, everything else is "entry controlled."
One long hallway reveals administrative offices while other corridors provide spaces created for various units such as investigation, traffic and safety and community policing. A room for the department’s bicycle patrol is also on site. The second floor of the building reveals a workout area for officers.
State-of-the-art communications equipment and up-to-date video monitoring systems are inside and outside of the building.
A separate access garage to bring prisoners in has also been built. Both the entry and the exit to this garage is electronically controlled by the dispatcher so that even the police officer taking the prisoner into the building will not have any control of the access to this entry or exit.
Something the borough police department has never seen before is also a part of the new headquarters — female locker space. In addition, a modernized evidence and storage room as well as a police firearms storage room has also been built. There are three cells to hold prisoners.