Following a 2013 scandal surrounding former Haines Borough Police Chief Gary Lowe and the subsequent hire of Bill Musser, who lasted only a year on the job, the pressure is on the borough to find a suitable police chief.

When interim manager Julie Cozzi urged the assembly to hire former chief Musser in February 2014, she assured the assembly “there is no harm in trying.”

However, the Public Safety Commission had advised against the hire, stating department staff wasn’t impressed with Musser when they met him as a job candidate.

Musser submitted his resignation in late March and left a month later.

Former officer Adam Patterson, who resigned in January, said he lost respect for Musser during an investigation of a spree of car break-ins. Patterson said he was frustrated that residents were blaming the officers for the long delay in charges being brought, when really it was Musser’s “laziness” and “incompetence.”

Patterson said Musser sat on the case, even when new evidence involving photos of the suspects on two stolen cameras emerged. Patterson considered the photos, which two thieves took of themselves during the break-ins, to be a godsend.

“That could have drawn a confession from them. To me, it was a silver platter handed to us,” Patterson said.

Instead of acting on the new information, Musser dawdled, Patterson said. He dragged his feet on sending in a supplemental report and found excuses to delay, Patterson said. “I would have been fired had I taken that long to file a report,” he said.

Patterson said he continued to hound Musser, as irritated residents were coming up to him every day to ask him why charges hadn’t been brought. Patterson tried to tell Musser, who was new to town, how important the case was to the community and how “pissed off” people were about the lack of charges.

Last July, Patterson met with assistant district attorney Amy Paige in Juneau. When he asked Paige how the case was going, Paige said she was going to ask him the same question. Paige told Patterson that Musser had stopped responding to her emails.

“He was responding to no one. He wasn’t responding to me. He wasn’t responding to the DA,” Patterson said. “He just let it sit and the case went stale. He just sat at his desk and would not answer to anybody.”

Paige said she wouldn’t comment on any “former performance issues,” but said she has an extremely open door when it comes to maintaining communications with law enforcement.

“Some officers take advantage of that more than others,” Paige said. “Chief Musser was not among the individuals who took advantage of it.”

Paige said she is “looking forward to developing a stronger line of communication” with the next chief.

Paige said that before hiring its next police chief, the borough should talk with people who worked on a day-to-day basis with a potential chief candidate. That means speaking with district attorneys, probation officers, dispatchers and investigators to see how the person “worked with every spoke of the criminal justice wheel.”

Getting someone who has experience working in a small town like Haines, or who is willing to adjust to their surroundings, is “the first and foremost” priority, Paige said.

“If you get somebody that comes in that is not prepared to kind of adjust their expectations or the way they do business to reflect the community they are in, there is going to be a problem,” she said.

Haines resident Bill McCord has been asking the borough assembly and administration for months to change its hiring process. “It seems to me if you keep doing the same thing over and over again, then you’re probably not going to get a different solution,” McCord said.

McCord has suggested the borough sponsor public forums on the hire, to get input on what the community wants out of its chief and its public safety policies. “It’s messy democracy, but a lot of people come out of it feeling a lot better about the results,” McCord said.

Public Safety Commission chair Jim Stanford said he envisions a similar process. “I really do think the public needs to be involved,” Stanford said. “I think they need a say in who is going to be our next police chief.”

The commission hasn’t met since April. Stanford said he’s largely been left in the dark as to what is going on with the hire, and also what is happening with the $22,000 Russell Consulting study of the police department.

“We have not been informed as to what is going on at all,” Stanford said.

Stanford attributed the lag in the commission’s meeting to busy summer schedules, and said even though he hasn’t heard much from manager David Sosa, he thinks Sosa wants the commission involved in the hiring process.

“I think (the administration) would like to have the Public Safety Commission involved in that process, but to what extent I’m not sure,” Stanford said.

Sosa said the results from Russell Consulting’s police department study will help determine the path moving forward. “What it says in the study is going to be a big part of the questions we ask a candidate,” he said.

The draft study was recently forwarded to the Alaska Municipal League Joint Insurance Association for legal review, he said.

“I think it’s important that we hear from the public on what their expectations are from a police chief. How we go about doing that is open to debate,” Sosa said.