Photo: Flanked by her mother and father, Belmont’s newest Police Officer Emily Ricci has her picture taken at her swearing in on Aug. 3 at Belmont’s Town Hall.

The Belmont Police Department welcomed two law enforcement veterans into the department in a Monday, Aug. 3 ceremony. 

Emily Ricci and Robert Ludwig were sworn in by Assistant Town Clerk Meg Piccione in the Town Hall auditorium with Belmont officers, Belmont elected officials, town staff, and family and friends in attendance.

Four additional police hires began 22 weeks of Recruit Officer Courses, a basic training curriculum overseen by the Municipal Police Training Committee at its Randolph Police Academy. 

“The swearing in is a time-honored tradition that affirms the dedication of a public servant to the protection of the community,” Belmont Police Lt. Paul Cowing to begin the ceremony. “A solemn vow to serve the people based on the law, the Constitution, and what is best for Belmont.

“… [T]his ceremony will mark their commitment to a new community and the start of a new chapter in their professional lives,” said Cowing.

Ricci and Ludwig are lateral/post-certified officers transferring from their previous posts.

A Bedford native, Ricci began her law enforcement career in 2020 with the Richland County (SC) Sheriff’s Department after graduating from the University of South Carolina with a degree in psychology. She was a dispatcher with the Belmont Police Department for the past two years. Ricci joins her brother, a Burlington PD detective, as an officer in Massachusetts.

With Ricci and a candidate at the Academy, Belmont will soon have eight female officers.

After serving in the US Air Force, Ludwig began his career with the Dracut Police Department in 2014 before joining the Carlisle Police Department, where he was both a firearms instructor and a patrol officer. He matriculated at UMass Lowell, where he earned a degree in criminal justice. 

This group of a half-dozen successful applicants are the first hires by Belmont’s new Police Chief Shane Smith. 

“It’s such a milestone for me personally,” said Smith. “This was a very competitive process … and these two stood head and shoulders above everyone else.” 

Unlike past police chiefs, Smith was not constrained by the state’s Civil Service system in which applicants take a competitive examination, and those eligible candidates are then rank-listed. Due to Civil Service’s strict adherence to ranked lists, departments are prevented from hiring high-potential or diverse candidates lower down if scoring thresholds interfere. 

“We were having trouble recruiting applicants, given the restraints of Civil Service,” according to Town Administrator Patrice Garvin. In the final four years under the system, Belmont received less than a dozen applicants: four candidates in 2020, three in 2021, two in 2022, and just a single candidate in 2023. 

The resulting impact was an undermanned department and large yearly budget payouts in overtime, said Garvin. In 2024, Belmont’s Town Meeting voted for the police department to leave the state-run program. 

And this year, the number of applicants has exploded.

“We received 53 applicants to fill the vacancies, and I think it’s a direct result of bringing [Smith] on board,” said Garvin, who praised his ability to use more recruiting avenues “to make sure we have the best applicants.”

“Coming from the agency that never had civil service in New Hampshire, you have to go out and recruit people,” said Smith. Because so many local police departments depend on lists of applicants, they don’t have a culture of actively finding and attracting hiring new people for a job, he said. For Smith, it was second nature.

“I took basically the blueprint that I had from [Salem, NH] that was very successful, and I brought it to Belmont,“ said Smith.

With younger people using apps, Smith focused on PoliceApp.com, a popular law enforcement job site.

“We paid a small fee, which also allowed the site to push Belmont to the top and also push us out over social media. We did our own pushing out as far as Instagram and Facebook and had people share it.” Smith said one of the six who was selected – a recent graduate from the University of New Hampshire – reached out to him on LinkedIn, the Microsoft-owned business and employment-oriented social networking service.

“I said, ‘Are you interested in being a local law enforcement officer?’ because he had a degree in Homeland Security. He said, ‘Absolutely, I am.’ So through a wide array of social media, we get an educated college athlete who is one of your people who will be studying August 3rd in the academy in Randolph.”

“I was beyond pleased with the people who came in for a chief’s interview at the end, and I was blown away by the candidates who were before me. Educated, articulate, well-rounded, from various backgrounds,” said Smith.

And the large number of applicants allowed Smith to be selective about who he wanted in the department.

“I had several certified officers apply. I did not select them. I would only take the best. I’ve learned in my career that if you settle for what’s out there, bad things will happen. Maybe not now. Maybe not in my time here. The last thing I want is a future chief to say, “I cannot believe that Chief Smith hired this person.”