An appreciation: Jim Willis - public servant, mentor, pioneer, peace keeper, gentleman

NORTHEAST HARBOR, Aug. 1, 2023 - Equanimity, moderation, respect, patience.

These are not characteristics I usually associate with cops.

Reporters and cops seldom make a felicitous pairing. We are often thrust into the same circumstances not of our making. Reporters - at least the good ones - always wanted to know more. Cops - at least the good ones - always wanted to manage the information flow.

I was a half step away from being a member of SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) and its off-shoot, Weather Underground, until I took up the cause of journalism.

But the impulse not to trust “The Heat” stayed with me for 50 years and when I began muckraking on the island three and half years ago I didn’t expect that things had changed that much.

Until I met Jim Willis, who is finishing his career as a law enforcement officer this week.

Police Chief Jim Willis. (Islander photo)

Jim Willis never failed to return any of my calls, or emails, even though he knew the subject was often about a sticky matter. He felt it was his duty, to do his best to inform the public and my 3,140 subscribers, no matter what the final result may be.

That’s a lot of trust.

Willis has serious law enforcement chops lest anyone thinks he is just a high-level desk jockey. On June 13, 1999, Willis did something few cops do in a career. He shot a suspect, Richard Burdick, 49 at the time, in a gun battle in Orland.

“Deputy Jeffrey McFarland was shot twice in the chest and his vest protected him. He has since retired. I returned fire and shot Richard Burdick who remains in prison,” Willis stated in an email.

Burdick is a Massachusetts child molester who vanished during his trial in 1998 and was spotted at a homeless shelter in Orland just hours after being profiled on America's Most Wanted.

Willis was 34 at the time. In 2003 he was named police chief in Mount Desert.

In 2013, Mount Desert Town Manager Durlin Lunt got an odd request from Dana Reed, town manager in Bar Harbor, who asked to “borrow” his police chief since Bar Harbor had a unplanned vacancy in that position.

“At the time I was the president of the Maine Chiefs of Police Association. And I was finishing up a new college degree. It was a busy time in life,” Willis said in an interview in his office in Northeast Harbor Friday.

“I think the reason they wanted me was because I'm a known entity. I worked at the sheriff's department for 20 years. So everybody knows me and, and I had been on the island for ten years or so. And I'd actually been working with with the officers of Bar Harbor PD.”

The rank-and-file was without a chief in Bar Harbor. Willis actually helped them hire an attorney.

“They were being asked questions by private investigators and so I tried to help them and then lo and behold, I became their acting police chief.”

Still, suddenly, the commander of a handful of policemen in the sleepy burg next door was now the chief of police in “metro” Bar Harbor as well.

“I guess the department had a different culture about it than what I was used to. And I operated things differently. So in the beginning - my wife still teases me - I said I'll do it for two months .. ten years ago.

“But what happened is I started to see things that look really obvious to me that we could do pretty easily.

“You know, if you have a cruiser at the Town Hill market and now there's an emergency at the Somesville One Stop, that car should be able to go. Back then we didn't do that. Yeah, it's amazing. It just made no sense, right?”

“I was involved in the first one in Maine, we did in Hancock County to divide the county into patrol areas and make sure everybody got better coverage. And so I really just took that thinking and applied that to our two towns. And we created, I call them patrol zones, that ignored town lines. And we're still using them.”

Willis began to look for other efficiencies and benefits of consolidation and scale, like recruitment - how a small police force in Mount Desert was able to attract candidates who knew they would be trained on the best law enforcement practices and have upward mobility.

One of them was Lt. Chris Wharff in Bar Harbor, who has the double duty as harbormaster. Captain David Kerns developed the same aptitude under Willis. They both possess the low-key approach to problem-solving in law enforcement where “less is more.”

But merging resources also has life and death implications. By sharing equipment and training, police officers learn uniform practices, like how to handle the same tasers.

“We think about training cops with muscle memory. When you're in an emergency situation, you just go on autopilot to taser buttons. If it’s on a different place on your taser than my taser, somebody might get hurt really badly.”

I pushed Willis on the uneven police coverage on the island, especially on the Quietside, with one town, Tremont, not having its own police force which he said was a “shame.” Southwest Harbor fired its town manager three years ago in part when he began to explore a partnership with Bar Harbor and Mount Desert.

“That's one thing that I liked about coming to work for a municipality is it’s a two- edged sword. There's a tremendous amount of accountability working for a municipality. But there's also a tremendous sense of community and how well we all take care of one another.

“I couldn't imagine anybody in either town saying ‘we'll get there when we get there.’

“We will get there fast. We have adequate budgets, we're well supported. That's how it works.”

Willis said he remembers a consultant who said every police department will take on the personality of its chief “over time.”

“I think that's really true. And my personality was different. So not everybody, not everybody stayed. But there were things like how reports are done and how report approvals are done. My systems are very different than what was in place. I don't ever like to say one's right or wrong, but there's one that I use. So we began to put those things into place.”

There is no question that Bar Harbor and Mount Desert will continue to share police resources at about a 60-40 split in cost. Willis has perfected the model. And Kerns stands ready to be the next chief.

Beyond that, there is still much to do, like an island-wide dispatch service. Apart from the obvious benefit from new technology, there is the prosaic consideration of staffing. It’s easier to hire a staff for an island-wide dispatch service, including the national park service, than its is for individual towns to hire their own personnel.

But not every circumstance has a ready playbook for police officers. Some of it just relies on the experience of an individual officer, like when officer Kevin Edgecomb arrested a protester in front of Leonard Leo’s house in Northeast Harbor for calling him a “fucking fascist” from a passing car.

Or when 73-year-old AnnLinn Kruger was confronted by three police officers - one of whom wasn’t even on duty - in two police vehicles who drove up the sidewalk at Holy Redeemer Church last summer when she painted on the sidewalk to protest the influence of Leo, the Federalist Society operative.

That’s a lot of firepower for someone exercising free speech.

Kruger also would be subjected to harassment by the then town manager, Kevin Sutherland, who threatened to have her arrested even though he lacked any such authority. Kruger then sought relief from the town council but never got any support, except from member Gary Friedmann, who said the town owed her an explanation.

Two other members went as far as to publicly challenge Kruger’s right to free speech at a meeting Oct. 18, 2022. View video here starting at 2:35:37.

Erin Cough, who was soundly defeated for re-election this June, actually suggested that Kruger be sued for “crossing the line” in her exercise of freedom of speech.

“They have the right to speak and when it crosses a line to become something more we have courts and things and lawsuits if necessary to follow up with that. So freedom of speech has a line. It's not a line that this council created. It's a line that's in our Constitution.”

Recently, Leonard Leo and right-wing state lawmaker Billy Bob Faulkingham of Winter Harbor espoused similar views in op-ed articles in the Bangor Daily News and the Islander.

Former council member Jill Goldthwait, who did not seek re-election, introduced the topic Oct. 18 by saying Kruger’s assertions during the public comment part of the council meetings “are unfair and inaccurate ... I think it was very painful to hear some of the comments that were made, and and simply have to let them be out there and not be addressed.” Goldthwait, who writes a column in the Islander, said, “I don't know what to do but is this how we're going to start every meeting from now on?”

Willis declined to comment on actions taken by specific officers. Edgecomb and another officer are being sued for arresting the protester, a charge which was dismissed by the Hancock County district attorney.

He agreed that since the George Floyd death, police officers have had a steep learning curve on how to deal with a new array of situations. “I think we take those as they come in as learning moments when something goes awry,” he said.

He was criticized by former council chair Paul Paradis and others for providing police escort for the June 7, 2020 Black Lives Matter protesters who marched through the streets of town.

“Jim, they’re carrying signs that said F— the police,” he recalled Paradis saying.

“They (protesters) didn’t want us, and we were like you can march all you want but we're gonna keep you safe while you do it.”

“I give Dave Kerns full credit for that because he made those decisions, and just did a really good job of that.”

“My responsibility is to the community at large. I worked for the people here. And I think we figured out how to do that in these towns.”

The stress of police work is high, especially on police chiefs. Willis is on three blood pressure meds, he said.

Kerns, who attended a session taught by Dr. Lewis Schlosser, a police psychologist who provides mental health counseling for the department, came back and told Willis that Schlosser said, “If you're 56 and you're still a police chief, you need to get out now before it kills you.

“That's the data,” Willis said. “Wow.”

“So I called him and I said I'm 58 and he said you’re two years late. Get out.”

Willis has taken a less stressful job as a law enforcement consultant but said he has mixed emotions about leaving.

“I took a course a while ago called Leading by legacy, taught by the International Chiefs of Police Association,” Willis said. “They drove it into our heads that you get to control what people think about you when you're gone.”

Jim Willis will forever be remembered as the first person to successfully operate a meaningful municipal collaboration on MDI, where towns have tribal tendencies that rob citizens of solutions to big problems. The housing crisis comes to mind.

“I think I've left both of these places in better shape than when I got here.

“Someone said to me recently, when you get done, that's going to be a mess.

“And I said, no, it doesn't need to be if we've done our jobs right. They're not going to notice I'm gone. That's what I'd like to have happen.”