Frost to replace Hegermiller as Riverhead Police Chief

After 42 years with the department, Riverhead Police Chief David Hegermiller is retiring and will be replaced next week by another department veteran, Lt. Ed Frost, according to Town Supervisor Tim Hubbard.

Chief Hegermiller did not respond to a request for comment this week, but Mr. Hubbard said the veteran lawman told him, “’It’s been 42 years and it’s time.’”

Mr. Hubbard said the Town Board decided to hire from within.

“In a retirement like this, we always lose institutional knowledge and that’s something that’s hard to replace with somebody new coming from the outside,” the supervisor said. “But because we’re promoting from within, we won’t lose as much as we would if we hired someone from the outside. So it’s not as big a hit as it would be, but still, there’s stuff he ran across in 42 years the next person coming in may have never seen. So it’s important when you lose someone like that to try to fill it as best you can, and I think we’re doing that by hiring from within.”

Mr. Hubbard — who served for years as a Riverhead police officer and later detective — hailed Mr. Hegermiller’s oversight of the department since he took the helm as Chief in 2022, after joining the department in 1981.

“I would match ours up against any police department in Suffolk County. We’re just as good, if not better, and a lot of that credit has to go to him because he’s the chief of the department,” Mr. Hubbard said, noting Riverhead’s “extremely high” closure-rate-by-arrest record.

The supervisor said that Lt. Frost will be appointed at a special Town Board meeting next Wednesday at 4 p.m. at Riverhead Town Hall.

“We’ll accept the chief’s resignation and appoint Lt. Frost,” he said, calling Mr. Frost “more than qualified,” for the job, having served for more than 30 years on the force.

Mr. Hegermiller, the highest paid employee in the town in recent years with a current salary of $225,637, got an 8.5% raise last December and signed a new contract that ran through the end of this year. It was not clear why the chief decided to retire now.

Mr. Frost did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment on his upcoming appointment.

Mr. Hubbard said that Captain Richard Smith was also considered, but he had told Town Board members that he plans to retire in the near future and “we don’t want to have to do this twice if we don’t have to.”

News of the chief’s retirement was first reported by Riverhead Local.