Council will vote Monday to promote lieutenant
The Beacon City Council is expected to vote Monday (May 20) on promoting Lt. Tom Figlia to succeed Police Chief Sands Frost, who is retiring next month.
Frost, 61, was tapped to serve as acting chief for four months following the retirements of Chief Kevin Junjulas and Capt. Gary Fredericks in July 2020. He was named chief in December of that year after a search committee selected him from a pool of 30 candidates. His last day will be June 14, leaving him one month short of 41 years with the department that hired him in July 1983 as a patrol officer.
Frost said he plans to work, albeit in a less stressful environment, while waiting for his wife to retire when she is eligible in six years. At that point, the couple may move to the Adirondacks, he said.
Taking over as chief in 2020 was not easy, Frost said this week, with the country in the midst of a pandemic and “defund the police” protests in the wake of George Floyd’s murder at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer.
“A lot of chiefs were bailing all over the country,” he said. “It was a tough time, but the officers became more involved with the community and I thought we were very successful.”
Those challenges led to a number of changes, including the addition of Lashaveous Dicker, a behavioral health specialist placed with the department through a partnership with Mental Health America of Dutchess County. “I’m not sure we would have gotten Lashaveous if we had asked for that a year earlier,” Frost said.
The chief notified city officials of his plan to retire earlier this year. Mayor Lee Kyriacou said during the council’s May 13 workshop that he, City Administrator Chris White and Human Resources Director Sara Morris had reached a “unanimous conclusion” to recommend Figlia, 41, who is senior among the Beacon Police Department’s two lieutenants.
Kyriacou noted the “very clear succession” in the department and said that once Figlia expressed interest in the job, he, White and Morris interviewed him. “Without having to go outside [the department], we concluded that clearly the succession is correct,” Kyriacou said.
The City Council met with Figlia in a closed session after its May 6 meeting. 
The Police Department at full strength has 36 officers, including the chief. It will have 30 after Frost leaves next month, and will be down to 28 after two sergeants retire in July. White said Wednesday (May 15) that he expects several officers to be promoted the week after Frost’s retirement to fill some of those slots.
Figlia has been with the department since being hired as a patrol officer in 2006. He moved to Beacon with his family in 1989 and attended the city’s public schools from first grade through high school. He joked with the council during the May 13 workshop that he is not as popular as his mother, “Ms. Ginny,” the children’s librarian who retired in 2021 after 31 years at the Howland Public Library.
Figlia acknowledged during the workshop that “the department I came into was a different department than the one we have now,” a reference to the U.S. Department of Justice’s oversight for more than a decade, through 2016, of the Beacon police following a number of lawsuits against the city. The agency issued nearly a dozen pages of recommendations regarding the use of force, weapons, canines and procedures for processing complaints.
Figlia led the implementation of some of those recommendations. In 2015 he was promoted to patrol sergeant and later became the department’s use-of-force instructor. He oversaw the introduction of body cameras for officers in 2018, the same year he was promoted to lieutenant. He is also the department’s sexual harassment prevention and de-escalation instructor, and in 2017 spearheaded a more than two-year project to review and rewrite department policies.
“I don’t know of anybody who knows our policies better than Lt. Figlia,” Frost told the council this week. “He knows the people in this community; he knows the geography of the city. He knows all of our officers. He knows their strong points and their weak points.”
After Fredericks’ retirement, Figlia took over many of the captain’s duties, including recruitment and overseeing the selection process for new hires. He was also placed in charge of internal investigations and managing complaints lodged against officers.
In 2020 Figlia worked with the leaders of Beacon 4 Black Lives and other groups to manage 25 demonstrations — the most in Dutchess County, according to Frost. All took place without injuries or arrests.
If approved by the council, Figlia said he wants “to continue to build on the work we’ve done over the past four years to consistently strive to improve relations with the community, and to improve the perception and trust that the community has in the Police Department.”
He said he hopes to expand the department’s social media presence, reinstitute a bicycle patrol and improve communication through consistent news releases.
In addition, officers will continue to participate in community events, walk Main Street and interact with students at Beacon High School. “That’s where people build trust, when they get to know each other,” Figlia said.
