Coast Guard leaving local shooting range for Devens

By Richard Gaines
Staff Writer

August 16, 2008 12:15 am

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Beseeched by protests of unscheduled day and night gunfire — including military assault rifles — at the Police Department's unauthorized practice range, city councilors have resolved to take some of the wild, wild west out of West Gloucester.

The U.S. Coast Guard has announced it will shift its marksmanship training from West Gloucester to Fort Devens in Middlesex County where a new facility opened last spring, and city police firearms supervisor Sgt. William Leanos and Chief John Beaudette have pledged to limit future use of the range to city policemen and -women.

Those and other moves have cone after a series of hearings on the issue.

Except in deep winter, "there's a constant racket," said Councilor Philip Devlin who represents West Gloucester, the city's fifth ward.

"What does a neighborhood do?" asked Nubar Alexanian, who lives on Sumner Street directly across Essex Avenue from one-lane Forest Lane. Unpaved, it pushes straight ahead through deep woods past two locked barriers to the range at the earthen embankment of Haskell Reservoir.

On the range, the Police Department, the Coast Guard, the Cape Ann Regional Response Team and the Municipal Police Training Committee and a small number of unidentified others, according to a report from the Police Department, have been sharpening their marksmanship while creating auditory mayhem in the rural expanse of the city. They have been out there since the Cape Ann Sportsman's Club exiled the force from its range off Cherry Street in 1992.

"We needed a place to shoot," Lt. Joseph Aiello said in explaining the move to the West Gloucester site. He said the sportsman's club recently rebuffed an request to allow the police to come back.

"The aural sensation is you sort of jump and your body tenses up, especially when the assault rifles (the city's AR15s and the Coast Guard's M16s) are heard," said Jean Grobe of Lincoln Street. She and Alexanian live about the same distance from the range.

"We're tired of being afraid," added Alexanian, speaking for his neighbors, who, a year ago, began pushing for some reasonable limits on the shooting.

According to Leanos' report to the council, the Coast Guard had been shooting at the range more often even than the Gloucester police officers.

The Coast Guard spent 18 days on the range last year; the police 12 days, the same number as the Municipal Police Training Committee personnel. The Cape Ann Regional Response Team was there twice. The range was also used for five days by groups listed as "other" by the report.

In announcing the decision to shift its shooting to Fort Devens, Sector Commander G.P. Kulisch thanked the "good people of Gloucester" for their support and "flexibility."

Personnel from the entire Coast Guard Boston Sector, running from the capital city to the New Hampshire line were brought to West Gloucester for fire arms training.

Pressure for limits to the times and timing of the shooting came not just from residents in the vicinity of the range, but Mayor Carolyn Kirk and the patrolmen's union also have questioned the need for so much fire arms training.

In an interview, the mayor said the police need to reach a clear settlement with the residents to eliminate uncertainty over the timing of the shooting.

Kirk described the agreement as the "rules of engagement" over "how and when."

In one of the first acts of her mayoralty last January, Kirk raised concerns about the zeal the department brought to fire arms training by the Beaudette team including Leanos who is also the chief fire arms instructor for the state.

She did this by vetoing about half the spring order of 27 cases of 40-caliber cartridges for the standard Glock 50 semiautomatic handguns that are carried by the 60 uniformed officers. The department has an annual ammunition budget of $12,000, but police business manager Philip Terpos noted that prices have risen as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have absorbed output.

Terpos said the order for 27 cases was excessive due to the concern about availability.

The mayor chided the department and said the culture needed to change.

The patrolmen's union has complained that Leanos and Beaudette seem obsessed by the need for firearms' training. It has been more than three years since a firearm has been discharged in the line of duty in this community, which has been spared the urban shootings that have become relatively common elsewhere.

"There's been a significant increase in the use of the firing range in recent years," said Patrolman Mike Williams. "The majority of the occurrences are not necessary."

Patrolman's union President Jack Foote told the Times, "we can do it (training) in two weeks."

Leanos, however, scoffed at the suggestion the required shooting could be done in neat little chunks due to scheduling. Each officer must be trained annually in handgun, rifle and shotgun.

Devlin has filed an order for an ordinance to bar weekend and night shooting and require the practice to be done between March 15 and May 15 and again between Sept. 15 and Nov. 15 (or about 120 days).

That raised another question.

"Why is there a range if there is no ordinance?" asked Councilor John "Gus" Foote (the father of union President Foote).

Leanos indicated fitting into those limits would not be possible, but he said the department has agreed to "no shooting on weekends."

Council President Bruce Tobey, however, found that concession insufficient.

He said the hearings have found ways to cut the time spent shooting "in half, but we've got more cutting to do. I need the administration to say it will get us there," he said, and proposed as a deadline the first council meeting in September.

"Absolutely," said James Duggan, the mayor's administrative assistant.

Richard Gaines can be reached at rgaines@gloucestertimes.com

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