April 11, 2017 — About a half-dozen times a year, the folks at The Open Door in Gloucester receive a phone call — or even a knock on their Emerson Avenue door — to see if they’re interested in some donations of fresh seafood.
The offers don’t arrive from entrepreneurial fishermen or someone looking to unload a bunch of seafood off the books.
The offers come from the Environmental Police. And the answer is almost uniformly yes.
“Generally, they call, but sometimes they just show up,” said Julie LaFontaine, The Open Door’s executive director. “Our mission is to alleviate the impact of hunger in our community, so when we have the opportunity of receiving free food — especially something as healthy and beneficial as locally caught, fresh seafood, we take it and then we distribute it through our food pantry.”
The Environmental Police have made a practice of donating seized seafood — or seafood unable to be returned to the water — to social service agencies, such as food pantries, shelters, veterans organizations and the like.
“It something that we’ve been doing since before I even came on the force and something that we do all the time, distributing this fresh seafood in communities up and down the coast,” said Environmental Police Maj. Patrick Moran, who is in his 33rd year on the force. “Mostly, it’s donations of fresh fin fish.”
But not always.
In late March, the Environmental Police donated dozens of lobsters to the Veterans Transition House in New Bedford, which serves homeless and at-risk veterans and their families in the southeastern region of the state.