Inside the Village of Mamaroneck Police Department: What I Didn't Know

by Marina Kiriakou -

A community member goes behind the badge — and shares what she learned.

There is a thin blue stripe painted along the hallway of the Village of Mamaroneck Police Department, running at chair-rail height the length of the corridor.  I noticed it on my way in and figured it was decorative — a nod to the uniform.

By the time I left, I understood it differently.

I had come to spend two hours with Chief PJ Trujillo and four hours on patrol with one of his officers.  I am a long-time community member.  I thought I had a reasonable sense of what our local police department was and how it worked.

I was surprised by how much I didn't know.

Chief PJ Trujillo

Twenty Years, Every Rank

Chief Trujillo has been with this department for 18 years, rising through every rank before becoming chief.  He came to Mamaroneck at age 26, after serving two years in New York City with NYPD.  The Chief is the son of a woman who immigrated from the Dominican Republic and raised him on a single principle: "Success isn't owned. It's rented. And every day it's due."  You can hear that in how he talks about his chosen profession.  He lives in the village; with his wife and two sons who attend Mamaroneck High School.  There is no coasting in his vocabulary.

When I asked him how policing had changed since he started, he didn't answer in abstractions.  He turned his computer screen toward me and showed me.

It was Slack — the same app many of us use at work — but the channel he opened, Real-Time Crime (RTC), was a live feed of alerts flowing between police departments across Westchester County.  Stolen vehicles.  Larcenies in progress.  Wanted individuals.  Descriptions.  Plate numbers.  All of it moving in real time, between agencies, on a screen in front of him — the same system his officers access from mounted terminals in their patrol cars.  A suspect spotted in White Plains is flagged and visible to our officers within seconds.  A pattern of car break-ins emerging in Rye shows up before it reaches us.

"It's a game changer," he said.

The Role of Technology

The department operates 65 surveillance cameras across the village, footage from which has contributed to enhancing evidence or solving roughly 50 cases in the last four years.  License plate readers log every vehicle that passes through — time-stamped, location-tagged.  During my ride-along, a sergeant demonstrated this by pulling up the recorded movements of his own car across the area.

The department also operates two drones (one of them tethered) — with two more planned — equipped with GPS and deployable within minutes to monitor a crime scene, track movement, or support real-time decision-making like tracking the movements of a burglary suspect hiding in a backyard.  They have already proved their value: in one narcotics investigation, aerial drone footage captured several hand-to-hand drug transactions that became the basis for a search warrant and arrests.

Within five years, the Chief expects AI-assisted investigative tools to be part of standard operations.  This is not a big-city department importing big-city resources.  Ours is a 3.2-square-mile village, plugged into a county-wide intelligence network, operating with reach that would have been unimaginable two decades ago.

The Strategy Behind the Numbers

None of this technology matters, the Chief is quick to say, without the right strategy and the caliber of people behind it.  

His department operates on what criminologists call the broken windows theory — the idea that visible disorder, left unaddressed, invites more serious crime.  In practice, it means officers are proactive rather than reactive.  Minor infractions get attention.  Suspicious vehicles get stopped.  Each shift begins with a roll call — missions assigned, recent crimes discussed, officers briefed on what to watch for.  A minimum of five officers are on duty at all times, with detectives authorized to pursue suspects across state lines when leads require it.  The theory underlying all of it is simple: "You take care of the small crime; the big crimes are not able to fester."

The numbers are hard to argue with.  Overall crime in the village is down 41 percent from the prior year.  Larcenies — the most common property crime — dropped from 225 incidents to 85 in a single year.

Stopping it Before It Happens

But crime, Sergeant Andrew Benkwitt noted, is never static.  It evolves with opportunity and technology.  One pattern drawing attention across Westchester right now: burglaries at convenience stores and gas stations that sell lottery tickets or house ATM machines have become targets.  Criminals break in, strip both, and are gone in minutes.  The other pattern that grows more sophisticated daily is the prevalence of scams targeting ordinary residents.  The crimes that keep officers busy today are not the crimes that kept their predecessors busy a generation ago — and staying ahead of that shift is itself a full-time pursuit.

One stop, made because a Harbor Heights resident called about a suspicious vehicle parked on their street, led to the arrest of four armed gang members before any crime had been committed.  This is an example of community-police partnership.  A routine traffic enforcement stop — the kind that can feel like an inconvenience to a driver running late — is sometimes the thing that removes from the road someone who was on their way to do something far worse.

I asked about the tension in this.  Proactive policing means stopping people who haven't done anything serious yet.  That raises real questions about who gets stopped and why, questions that communities across the country have struggled with.  The Chief doesn't wave this away.  The department trains for it continuously — in de-escalation, in cultural sensitivity, in what it means to exercise discretion without bias.  Sergeant Benkwitt put it plainly during our ride: "You gotta learn how to talk to people.  Most people are just looking for help, honestly."

They Live Here Too

There are 52 full-time officers in this department.  Approximately 70 percent of them live here — in this village, on these streets.  Their children go to our schools.  They shop where we shop.  When I mentioned this to the Chief, he offered it as an explanation for something harder to quantify: why officers here seem to care about outcomes differently than they might if they didn't have a personal stake.  "That's what makes us unique and special," he said.  "The police department is ingrained into the community because they live here."

The department has grown significantly more diverse over the Chief's tenure.  When he started, there were roughly four Spanish-speaking officers.  There are now between 12 and 15.  The village's population is approximately 25 percent Hispanic, and the department has worked deliberately to build trust within that community — including an explicit, standing policy: immigration status is never a factor in any police interaction.  They do not contact ICE.  Period.  The message to every resident, documented or not, is unambiguous: "What matters for us is making sure you're not a victim of crime."

The Mental Health Challenges of the Job

Inside the department, there is an equally deliberate culture around something that policing has historically not talked about: mental health.  The job carries weight.  Officers absorb the worst moments of other people's lives, repeatedly, and without ceremony.  Chief Trujillo and his predecessor Chief Sandra DiRuzza have worked to build an environment where asking for help is not a sign of weakness.  The phrase he uses, and that his officers have clearly internalized: "It's okay if you're not okay."

State grants like the NY CARES UP grant have funded several initiatives: a renovation of a

wellness center, a place where an officer can go for physical activity time to prepare their mind and body to be on duty, which Chief Trujillo believes is therapeutic, a trip to a

Yankee game, officer wellness luncheon with guest speakers, and a movie night.  Small things.

But small things are how culture is built within a police department, one signal at a time.

The Line on the Wall

I walked in that morning with a notebook and the vague confidence of someone who has lived in a community for years and assumes familiarity.  The stripe on the hallway wall, I learned before I left, is a living symbol.  It represents something the Chief returns to when he talks about what this work is ultimately for — the line between order and chaos, between a community that feels safe and one that doesn't.  It's painted there so no one who walks those halls forgets what side of it they're responsible for.

I still had four hours ahead of me.  A patrol car.  Sergeant Benkwitt.  And, as it turned out — though I didn't know it yet — a stolen moped, a foot pursuit, and a police dog named Ike.

Part Two: The radio crackled, the lights went on, and everything I'd learned that morning suddenly made sense.