The towns will each get $150,000 from the Justice Department’s Community Oriented Policing Services program, which will fund 75 percent of the pay and benefits for two new officers each.

The Connecticut Department of Public Safety also received $2.25 million from COPS for 30 new officers.

Stratford, to the west of New Haven on the Long Island Sound, currently employs 105 officers to patrol a town of around 50,000 people. Stratford’s crime rate is unremarkable, just above Connecticut’s median, based on figures from the FBI’s uniform crime reports for 2001.

Clinton, to the east, which also received a grant, had one of the 20 lowest crime rates in the state. The FBI’s crime reports include only crimes that are reported to the police, which experts say means they are not necessarily an accurate measure of risk in a community, although a good means of judging a police department’s work load.

Eighteen other Connecticut police departments applied for grants from the COPS program but were deferred, according to Gilbert Moore, a spokesman for the Department of Justice.

Among them, he said, were police departments in Bridgeport, Windsor and New Britain. In 2001, Bridgeport had a population of 140,000 people and the state’s second-highest violent crime rate, according to FBI figures.

In 2001, the COPS program spent $4.5 million in Connecticut, 20 percent of which went to cities with the top five crime rates. Waterbury received half a million dollars from the program that year.

The program gives grants, Moore said, based on the strength of the application and a department’s qualifications for promoting “community-oriented” policing. Population and crime rates are not factors, he said.

“Grants tend to have a higher significance for smaller jurisdictions,” he said, saying two additional officers would be a significant change to a department that only has 10 to begin with.

Also, smaller agencies are more aggressive in pursuing grants, he said.

“The smaller departments need the help just as much” as those in big cities, said Jean O’Neil, director of research and evaluation for the National Crime Prevention Council (the folks who created McGruff, the Crime Dog).

Small towns around a large urban area may not have the same resources as a city but they have the same problems, she said, such as gang violence and methamphetamine abuse.

The COPS program handed out a total of $78.1 million in grants this week, said program officials, and there will likely be more grants awarded later this year.

The new grant will allow Stratford to put a police officer in its Wooster Middle School. The town’s two high schools already have police on site, and the elementary schools have D.A.R.E. (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) officers who conduct safety education programs.

“There have been student arrests at both schools, and we do rely on the [school police]”for enforcement and deterrence, said Raymond O’Connell, superintendent of Stratford public schools. He said the officers also provide counseling and sound legal advice to students.

Stratford will also be using the grant money to start a traffic program to “help bring down our fatal accident rate,” said Imbro.