‘I’m ready’: Retiring police chief reflects on 36 years in Concord uniform

The role of a police officer has transformed since Bradley Osgood first put on his Concord uniform in 1989.

For one, his suit at that time didn’t include a bulletproof vest. He carried a revolver, not a semi-automatic. Traffic tickets, crash diagrams and arrest reports were all done by hand.

Officers weren’t really investigating cyber crimes, let alone forming a distinct computer crimes unit. The term school resource officer didn’t exist. The police force had no social workers or comfort dogs. Only a handful of people were known to be homeless in the city, and Osgood met each of them on his first day on the job.

At the same time, the outgoing chief said, “police work is always police work.”

The bad days, when tragedies strike, are still the bad days. The good days, swearing in new officers, breakthroughs in big cases, are still the good days.

Osgood has seen more days on the job in Concord, good and bad, than most. When he retires on January 23, he’ll have been chief for more than 12 years, having served just a few months shy of 37 years at the Concord Police Department and 40 in law enforcement altogether.

A successor, either on an interim or permanent basis, hasn’t been announced, but the department has historically promoted from within. Osgood was eligible for retirement 15 years ago, he said, but simply liked the work too much to stop. As he gets older, he said, the timing is right to step away.

“I’ve been going high speed for a long time, and I’m satisfied,” Osgood said. “I’ve accomplished a lot of things, and I just, I’m ready. Sad, but I’m ready.”

Chief since 2013, Osgood set out to lead “as much as from the front as from behind,” he said.

“I wanted to be a person that would support [the officers] and give them every opportunity to succeed,” he said. “I really wanted to make sure that they had all of the tools and resources that they needed to be successful in what they do, and that’s what I thought a
leader should do.”

The fruit of that approach is plain in recent years – from the addition of two officer positions in 2022, to two consecutive years of cash bonuses to patrol officers to aid retention in 2023 and 2024, to the revival of the patrol K9 program with a grant this year.

Nowhere has his goal for resources delivered more significantly, though, than in the plan for a new police station, approved by the Concord City Council just weeks before Osgood announced his plans to retire.

“When I first got here,” he said, “what I noticed about the police station was that it was very tired, it was very cramped.”

“They moved into this building in 1975, and by 1978 they had outgrown it,” he continued. Adding a third story in the 1980s and later moving the fire department into its own headquarters, he said, provided temporary relief.

As a patrol officer, Osgood couldn’t just knock on the then-chief’s door and say they needed a new building. Later, in the 2000s, he was assigned as a lieutenant to “planning and analysis” work. He brought in an intern who looked at new police station projects in towns across northern New England, interviewing their chiefs about the process.

“It was at that point in time that I began really trying to champion this project,” he said.

As chief, he quietly prodded city leaders about the need for a new headquarters, and a 2021 study on the current station determined it couldn’t be expanded or renovated by more than a few thousand square feet.

“The council was convinced that they wanted a long-term solution,” he said.

Then, in 2023, an option for the Concord Insurance Group building landed on the table. The $4.1 million dollar deal was one of the final official acts led by outgoing mayor Jim Bouley.

After two years of site work and designs, Concord City Councilors approved an additional $41 million for construction on the new headquarters in November. It will include a sizable addition to the mid-century office building and a centralization of the city prosecutor’s office and police department under one roof.

It will also more than triple the square footage of the current station. In that expanded space will be a larger women’s locker room, better evidence storage space, secure routes for processing those in custody, more garage and vehicle maintenance space, designated offices for the department’s social work team, and empty space awaiting future department expansion.

Councilors shaved $4.5 million off the original funding ask for the project, and the department is currently combing through the design to make those cuts, which Osgood described as “achievable.”

On the whole, though, he’s proud of the years he spent pushing for a new station. He hopes the new one will last at least another 50 years, as the current one has. Construction is expected to begin in the spring.

While Osgood notes that police work, at its core, remains the same, the department in his tenure has been a leader in the state for programs outside of patrol.

Concord was among the first cities in New Hampshire to put a social worker on staff in 2024.

Police social workers follow up on situations after officers respond, connecting people with services and help, whether that’s the family of a person who has passed away, an older adult who needs help accessing food or transportation, or a person in need of mental healthcare.

While some departments have used grants to support social workers, Concord’s social workers are on the city payroll. The team has now grown to three full-time staff and has been widely praised by department and city leaders.

Concord was the first department in the state to add a comfort dog to the ranks when Liberty, a yellow lab, joined the staff in 2018. Comfort dogs, unlike police K9s, don’t participate in investigation work. Rather, they’re trained to support trauma victims at a scene or in the aftermath, and maintain morale among residents and officers alike.

Another comfort dog, Bailey, is in training now.

The worst days, Osgood said, are when awful things happen in the city.

A ten-day stretch in the summer of 2019 saw four murders in the area, two of them murder-suicides and multiple cases rooted in domestic violence. The deadly trend continued into the fall, and one of the most violent years for homicide in recent state history left its mark on Concord.

https://www.newspapers.com/article/concord-monitor/187288562/

Article from Dec 28, 2019 Concord Monitor (Concord, New Hampshire) <!— –>

Each of those cases was resolved, Osgood said, but the long hours of investigation and the tragedy of each case took a toll on officers.

“That was bloody, violent and it was all at once,” he said. “They had no relief, and it was just one after another. It really tested our resiliency as an organization.”

Another such tragedy, three years later, put Osgood and his department in the spotlight. A retired local couple was shot to death on a walking trail near their home on the Heights. A months-long investigation, together with multiple police departments, led to the arrest and conviction of Logan Clegg, who had been living in a tent in the woods near where Steven and Wendy Reid were found.

The investigative breakthroughs, which Osgood called “remarkable,” are the wins that make up the best days as chief, he said.

But so are more commonplace accomplishments. Swearing in new officers are special occaisions for Osgood, who came to Concord straight from his graduation from the University of New Hampshire.

Osgood wasn’t someone who always knew he wanted to be an officer. In college, he started working in campus security and found he enjoyed it.

“I was just a college student looking for a campus job,” he said. “This one, the hours were good for me, and the pay was better than, you know, working in the library or something like that.”

Osgood kept following this new passion, taking on a part-time police job in Lee while still in school.

When he graduated, he applied to a string of departments in the state, and Concord – where a professor of his, David Walchak, was chief – was the first to give him an offer. He never left.

He sees the department as well prepared for the next chapter: the next generation of leaders have been diligent learners, and the force as a whole, he said, is the best trained in the state at interacting with people with mental illnesses. With a new station, he’s optimistic that state and national accreditation will follow.

The city has not announced yet who will be tapped to succeed Osgood, either on a short-term or a permanent basis. Osgood served as an interim chief for about a year before he was officially named chief. The department has three deputy chiefs, Matthew Casey, Barrett Moulton and Steven Smagula, and more than a half-dozen lieutenants.

No one specific thing prompted him to retire, Osgood said. It was just the right time.

“I would love to stay and be here for the opening of the new police station. I’d love to stay here to see the department become state-accredited, and then move on to the national,” he said. “I would love to see a lot of the accomplishments come to fruition, but if you do that, you never leave. Because there’ll always be something else, another project.”

Osgood doesn’t have set plans for the coming years – though he expects they’ll include time with his grandchildren, more teaching in the criminal justice program at New England College, travel, golf and quality time with his wife, who is also retiring in January, and their twelve-year-old Golden Retriever.