Riverhead swears in five new cops, boosting the ranks of full-time town officers to a new high

Riverhead Town has five new police officers. The new officers were appointed by Town Board resolution and sworn in by Police Chief Ed Frost during Tuesday’s board meeting at Riverhead Town Hall. 

Anthony Lazar, Jared Polak, and Julia Buczynski, who were already certified police officers working in other law enforcement agencies, began work with the Riverhead Police Department immediately. 

Buczynski and Lazar have both been employed as police officers by the New York City Police Department, according to publicly accessible payroll records.  Polak has graduated from the Suffolk County Police Academy and works as a part-time police officer with the Village of Westhampton Beach, Frost said.

Officers Krista Romer and Sebastian Wnorowski, who must attend and graduate from the Suffolk County Police Academy, were placed on an unpaid leave of absence until Dec. 9, when the next six-month training session at the academy begins, Supervisor Tim Hubbard said.

“Good luck to all of you and we’re proud to have you,” Hubbard told the young officers. 

The Riverhead Police Department has recently seen a changeover in its top brass and a wave of new recruits to fill vacancies, both resulting from the retirement of a significant number of veteran officers in the past few years. 

The department has also added officers to its ranks, increasing the number of full-time sworn officers from 88 in 2021 to the current 100, including the five sworn in this week. Expanding the department’s ranks has been a stated priority of the current town supervisor and his immediate predecessor in the job, both of whom are retired police officers. Hubbard, a lifelong Riverhead resident, had a 32-year career with the town police force. Former Supervisor Yvette Aguiar is retired from the NYPD, where she rose to the rank of sergeant.

The size of the town’s police department did not grow to keep up with the population growth of the town, officials have said. Additional officers are needed to ensure public safety, officials, including Hubbard, have maintained. 

“I refuse to cut corners when it comes to law enforcement,” Hubbard said.

Spending appropriations for the Riverhead Police Department in the 2025 town budget total just under $20.5 million, which represents 31.6% of the $64.9 million in the budget’s total general fund spending.

While spending on the police department has risen over the past decade, it has not outpaced, proportionately, the increase in general spending over the same period. In 2015, when the town had 90 sworn officers on its police roster, spending on police totaled slightly more than $14.2 million, which was 31.2% of total general fund spending of $45.7 million that  year.

Editor’s note: The article has been amended to update information about Officer Jared Polak’s prior employment. He was most recently employed by the Westhampton Beach Village Police Department as a part-time police officer, not as a traffic officer as previously reported.