Juneau Police Chief Ed Mercer is retiring this week after three decades in law enforcement in Southeast Alaska. He says it’s getting harder and harder to find people who want to do police work.
Deputy Chief David Campbell will serve as interim police chief until the next permanent chief is selected.
I think working criminal cases can be very complex – they’ve always been. And you know, I think we’ve tried different things in our state, like criminal reform, on dealing with societal issues and not just necessarily looking at putting people in jail as a means of fixing a problem. It just doesn’t go away. That made being a police officer and working cases and having habitual offenders repeat offend and continue to be out in the street.
And I saw that and … I never thought I’d ever have to work through a pandemic. And how that really was challenging for me. If you think about it, people were pulling back and staying in their homes. Well the police couldn’t do that – they had to be out there on the street, they had to be out there serving the public for calls for service. Nothing really changed in that arena. And things got challenging.
I always say that, you know, we police our community different than other communities. We have a lot more patience with our citizens and trying to listen to and be part of a solution to the problem as opposed to just “Well, I’m just going on another call for service, moving on, then I’m gonna go home and I’m gonna I’m going to be part of this community.”Also, on the topic of recruitment, you were Juneau’s first Alaska Native chief of police, and probably one of the first in the state.
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