The Ellsworth Police Department is entering a new chapter, with two of its longtime members recently taking top leadership roles after the agency moved into a new headquarters building last fall.
The department also expects to adopt two significant programs in the coming year: outfitting patrol officers with body cameras, and contracting with a public health agency to assist officers on mental health crisis calls. Furthermore, it expects to make more promotions in the coming months, according to new Chief Troy Bires and new Deputy Chief Shawn Willey.
The focus on new hires and programs is a welcome change for the department, which saw its former chief fired in March for suspicion of working while inebriated. Prior to that, the agency struggled for years to get a new, more spacious headquarters that met modern workplace safety standards. When the department moved into its new offices on High Street last fall, it was its first new headquarters in 90 years.
Bires and Willey, who have consistently declined to comment on their former chief, Glenn Moshier, were sworn in to their respective new positions with the department last week.
With Willey’s promotion to deputy chief, the department’s captain role is now vacant, but Bires said they expect to have that position filled via in-house promotion in the coming weeks. Downstream vacancies and promotions then are expected through the ranks, which likely will create an open patrol position later this fall. When that position is filled, likely early next year, the department will be fully staffed with 21 sworn police officers, he said.
Adding a new captain will create a full-time three-person command staff for the department for the first time since Moshier began serving in a dual role as police chief and city manager in late 2020.
“We have a pretty full plate,” Bires said of himself and Willey. “We need to get some of these things delegated to other people.”
Before those personnel changes are complete, the department will outfit its officers with body cams for the first time, likely by the end of the year. The body cams, which are part of an upgrade that also includes new dash cams for all the department’s cruisers, are expected to increase transparency, assist in investigations, and help protect officers against false claims and the city against liability issues, Willey has said.
The department also is looking to formalize an agreement with a public health agency to assist the department with mental health crises calls, according to Bires.
Currently, the department does reach out to organizations such as AMHC or Healthy Acadia to help out when responding to such incidents, but only gets such help when it calls during weekday business hours, Bires said. A more formal agreement, with a not-yet selected partner, would enable the department to contact a crisis intervention counselor as needed on nights and weekends.
Such an arrangement not only could improve the help that people get when they are in crisis, the chief said. If it turns out the call is more about counseling than preventing a crime, the counselor could stay with the person in need and the responding officer could respond more quickly to the next incident than if they had to stay, he said.
“When it’s not a criminal thing, it will free up our officers,” Bires said. “It’s going to be a work in progress.”
Despite the controversies surrounding Moshier’s tenure as police chief, the promotions of Bires and Willey makes official what had been the department’s de facto daily chain-of-command for years.
When Moshier served as both police chief and city manager, from late 2020 through the end of 2023, he spent much of his time in the manager role, leaving the everyday operations of the department to Bires and Willey, who during that time held the positions of deputy chief and captain, respectively.
