The five-member Haines Borough Police Department will soon be reduced to three.
Understaffed since the resignation of former chief Gary Lowe in April, the department will lose officer Josh Knore effective July 29.
Knore submitted his resignation Monday. He did not return CVN phone calls for comment.
“It’s reasonable,” said interim chief Simon Ford. “(Knore) came up here and checked it out, got a new career started and wants to move on to different things.”
The department, already stretched thin and working overtime, will have to make adjustments, Ford said. This will likely mean keeping remaining officers working or continually on standby and disregarding calls for matters like barking dogs, he said.
“Things that just aren’t a huge priority, they might not get dealt with for a few days, because we’re just going to have to triage and prioritize. You can’t cut the resources in half and get the same level of service.”
Ford said he is concerned that the chief position has not yet been advertised. Manager Mark Earnest said he will get out the advertisement for the position this week. It will be posted through the Alaska Municipal League and on national and statewide law enforcement websites.
“We’ve generated quite a number of letters of interest and applications through those websites in the past,” Earnest said.
Earnest said the borough likely will contract with Soldotna-based Russell Consulting LLC to conduct background checks on several final candidates.
Though Earnest said the borough is looking into hiring a temporary officer during the period of short staffing, Ford said he “doesn’t see that happening,” as most officers aren’t available for seasonal work. “If that’s an option, that would be great, but I don’t think it probably is,” Ford said.
Earnest said getting a new chief here will take at least two to three months and Ford said having another officer on the job may take as long.
Ford said the department has done better hiring residents without police training than seeking fully-trained outsiders. Out-of-towners tend to come here with a vision of what Alaska is like but eventually become discouraged by the long, dark winters, lack of services, and other facts of small-town life in rural Alaska.
“We’ve actually had better success taking people that we know something about their character and the kind of people they are and their trainability and making police officers out of them,” Ford said.
Ford was a butcher before he became a cop three years ago. “I had never even sat in a police car,” he said.
Officer Adam Patterson turned to a career in law enforcement last year after running a tourism business.
If the department selects an officer candidate without previous police experience, the individual would be required to attend the 16-week police academy in Sitka, further prolonging the hire.
The officer position will be advertised in the same venues as the chief position.
“We’ll just throw the net out and see what’s out there,” Ford said.