Houlton police chief recalls 35-year career

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HOULTON – Houlton Police Chief Darrel Malone described himself as “just a kid” when he became a full-time officer with the department on Jan. 20, 1966.

Now, after 35 years on the job, including 17 as chief, that career officially will end Nov. 30, when Malone retires at age 60.

“It’s going to be a new adjustment for me,” he said last Friday, during an interview in his office. “This has been the only life I’ve known since I was 24 years old.”

During his career, which has carried him up through the ranks from patrol officer to sergeant-detective in 1972, lieutenant in 1976 and finally chief in 1984, Malone has seen it all, from domestic disputes and molested children, to suicides, homicides, robberies and bad car accidents.

In his early days as a patrol officer, Malone said training was more of the on-the-job variety than it is today.

What training they had was voluntary – either two or four weeks – he said, and was, “general run-of-the-mill things you run up against as a police officer: first aid, firearms, traffic stops, criminal investigations.”

“Today, you’ve almost got to be a lawyer,” he said, adding that today’s officers are better educated and better trained.

“These officers are out there making split-second decisions that sometimes it takes the Supreme Court years to decide.

During his early years on the streets, Malone said Houlton largely was a farming and railroad community.

Every fall, when the potato harvest was under way, people poured into the area to help harvest the potato crop.

“They liked to celebrate a lot on the weekend,” he said with a grin. “A big night in the fall of the year was on Saturday night, after they got paid.

“You knew if you were on the middle shift, coming on duty Saturday afternoon, that you were going to be involved in no less than five or six arrests and sometimes more than that, for public intoxication,” he said. “And there were at least two fights on a Saturday night.”

During his career, Malone said there have been two highlights. One was the arrest of four people who robbed a local bank in June 1974.

After the bank robbery, he said it was 11/2 years before the FBI in Boston got a tip from an informant about a couple who bragged about a bank robbery in northern Maine. Further investigation revealed that a man and woman had stayed at Ivey’s Motel on Bangor Street and the other couple stayed at the Northland Hotel downtown.

The Northland was closed in 1975, but Malone recalled spending days pawing through old registration cards before he found the identity of one couple.

“It was empty and cold,” he said of the old hotel, which since has been demolished.

Eventually, the identity of the other couple was found in records at Ivey’s and clothes that had been used in the robbery were found behind the motel.

When arrests finally were made in 1976, “that was a real rush for me,” Malone said.

The other highlight was his successful three-year push to have a memorial to the state’s slain police officers erected in Augusta.

Not all the police departments initially supported the plan. Special legislation had to be passed to allow police officers to raise money for the project; and there was resistance to locating the memorial on the grounds of the state capital.

The memorial finally was dedicated in 1991, the year that Malone was president of the Maine Chiefs of Police Association.

Malone recalled times when his name could have been included on the memorial.

In one situation a few years ago, a man became upset in a domestic dispute with his former wife. State and local police were on the scene, but the man refused to talk to anyone but Malone.

Malone remembered accompanying the man into the house and sitting down at the kitchen table to talk. The man had placed on gun on the sideboard as they talked.

Malone agreed to take the man to see his wife, who was not in the house.

“I got up from the chair and I moved a little too quick,” he said, which prompted the man to take another gun out of the waist of his pants.

“Just take it easy,” Malone recalled the man saying. “Don’t do anything rash.”

Malone remained calm and the man put the guns away, and the two left the house together.

There have been some downsides in his career too, such as one in the early 1990s when a lieutenant was convicted of assaulting two female department employees, and more recently a ruling by the state’s labor board that Malone slanted promotional scores to favor nonunion officers in his department.

“As an individual, it is upsetting when those things happen,” he said after pausing. “When those things happen, you’ve got to do what you believe is right.

“Decisions have to be made and some of them are unpleasant,” he continued. “But if you’re going to be a police chief, an administrator, that’s part of your job.”

Though he is looking forward to retirement and having more time to spend with his family and grandchildren, Malone admits he will miss police work.

“It gets in your blood,” he said, matter-of-factly. “It’s something you feel inside. It’s something that you are.”