Lt. Ken Fitzjurls is a Belfast cop, and has been since 1977.

He has an easygoing, relaxed, conversational manner that betrays a childhood spent in the rural South – Paris, Ark.

Still, he’s not somebody you’d think of as a hand-holding, “I-feel-your-pain” kind of guy.

But the former trucker, a Vietnam Navy vet who sports tattoos on both his forearms, has recently become the Belfast Police Department’s first chaplain.

Late last year, the department’s then-chief, Allen Weaver, was contacted by the Maine Chiefs of Police Association about training officers to serve as chaplains. Weaver approached Fitzjurls about the idea, and he agreed to attend a two-week training session at the Maine Criminal Justice Academy in Vassalboro last October.

Fitzjurls and the other members of the first class of officers to complete the training were honored at a graduation ceremony on June 10. Then on July 8, the new Belfast police chief, Jeff Trafton, was host of a ceremony at the Belfast police station at which Fitzjurls’ son pinned a new badge onto his shirt.

His shirt’s collar now includes silver crosses, along with the rest of the uniform’s hardware. The crosses are military insignia for the chaplain position, he said. In addition, gold badges worn on his chest and on his hat designate him as chaplain.

Fitzjurls, 60, is the son of a Pentecostal pastor, so in many ways, his acceptance of the chaplain’s post is not hard to imagine. There are spiritual components to the job, but there are many other responsibilities as well.

Though he stressed that he is not an ordained minister, Fitzjurls served as an assistant pastor for a church in California for a time. He has contacted Belfast-area ministers to assist him in the work.

Fitzjurls was 32 when he joined the Belfast department 28 years ago, having had a job supervising a trucking outfit in Searsport and having spent six years in the Navy beforehand.

“I feel I’m better off for it,” he said.

Fitzjurls met his future wife, Corinne, while stationed in Boston with his Navy ship. The couple married and returned to her native Belfast. Four sons joined their family.

The experience of raising four boys, who now range in age from 26 to 37, can come in handy for the part of the chaplain’s job, in which Fitzjurls has to give a little fatherly advice to young officers.

“I try to give them as much advice as they’ll take,” he said, chuckling at the thought that young officers might dismiss him as an old-school dinosaur. Computers, cell phones and pagers were the stuff of science fiction, not police work, when Fitzjurls started at the department.

What he has found is that younger officers will respond to the advice – if it is accompanied by an explanation.

“If you show them the reasons why, they’ll accept it,” he said.

The larger issue of improving morale is also on the chaplain’s agenda. Some of that is achieved, Fitzjurls said, “by not joining in” when officers gripe about assignments or other matters.

Morale had been a problem at the Belfast department in recent years, but Fitzjurls is confident in Trafton.

“He has been one of the better things that has happened to the department since I’ve been here,” Fitzjurls said.

With police officers having a high-rate of substance abuse, the chaplain will also monitor for signs of those problems.

“Anything said to me in confidence has to be kept in confidence,” Fitzjurls said, though if he suspected an officer was under the influence of drugs or alcohol at work, the chaplain would go to the chief with his concerns.

A manual describing how the chaplain should handle various scenarios is part of Fitzjurls’ new equipment. The book is about 21/2 inches thick, he said.

“These guys are my major concern,” Fitzjurls said, gesturing to the squad room behind him. “Those are the ones I took the job for.”

He’ll visit with an officer out on sick or injury leave, send birthday cards, or just lend a sympathetic ear to one who is struggling through marital or family problems.

One of the toughest tasks a police officer faces is informing someone that a wife, son, daughter or father has died suddenly in, for example, a car crash. The death notifications are now handled, when possible, by the chaplain.

Since completing the training, Fitzjurls has done several death notifications.

“It is one of the most difficult things you can do,” he said. “There is no right way to do it.”

Before knocking on the door, Fitzjurls will get as much information about the family as possible in the short time he has, and will contact the family’s clergy or relatives to accompany him.

Responses to the devastating news usually fall into two categories.

“Either they say, ‘No, that didn’t happen,’ or they’ll completely fall apart,” he said, so much so that he will have to catch them before they collapse.

The spiritual component of the job is something with which Fitzjurls is comfortable. “I am a firm believer in the Lord above,” he said.