I climb into the large police truck with Sitka Police Chief Mike Hall and we head out on patrol. We drive downtown and then hit the state highway to cover every inch of Sitka’s 14-miles of paved road.
“We have one patrol officer working today, and when I have one, I usually come out and also work patrol so we keep good coverage and give the service needed to the community,” Hall says.
Hall says he’s looking out for anything out of the ordinary. Things like cars parked the wrong way, speeders, bicyclists on the sidewalk, or people peering in the windows of parked cars.
The daily patrol here in Sitka is a bit quieter for Hall than his last decade-and-a-half working with the U.S. State Department in countries like Afghanistan, Jordan, Lebanon, and Ukraine. But, he says, this is what he needed.
“After the war in Ukraine, I just was really tired mentally, I was tired physically, the stress — I just had enough,” Hall says. “I had my third war zone in a row without a break, and I was just exhausted. I was tired. I wanted to find a place just to heal.”
And it sounds like he’s found it.
“Three or four weeks ago, I told my wife, ‘This is like the most relaxed I’ve been in 17 years, I love it,'” Hall says. “Nobody’s shooting at me. There’s no rockets falling out of the sky, and I get to look at the beautiful mountains and the eagles and the whales and the sea lions and the seals, and I get to walk through Totem Park, and get on the beach and look for stuff. It’s just fantastic. Haven’t been fishing yet, but it’s coming.”
Hall’s been on the job for about two months now. He was hired on as a lieutenant last year and completed his Alaska police certification before being sworn in to the top role in March.
He’s inherited a police department that’s seen a tumultuous decade, marked by high department turnover, several lawsuits brought by former officers that were settled out of court, and public outcry after police euthanized six shelter animals by gunshot in 2024.
But Hall says he sees a path forward for the department, and that starts with hiring the right people for the job. He wants to attract more locals to the department, and when hiring from outside, he’s looking for candidates who really want to live in Sitka and become part of the community.
“I need to see good folks,” he says. “I need to see folks who love each other, [and] want to help each other out. That’s important to me, and I try to instill that to folks who apply here. This is what’s important in life. If you’re out here wanting to fight people, if you’re out here being a police officer because you want the excitement, you’re in it for the wrong reason. If you’re in it to help somebody, yeah, that’s where [it’s] at.”
He says in a town of just over 8,000, it would be easy to overpolice the community, but he doesn’t want to issue a ticket every time someone speeds a few miles over the limit or use jail as a catchall.
“Sometimes you can give a bit of grace, and that grace can go a long way in starting somebody on a new path,” he says. “That’s part of our community policing model.”
Or he says, they could also underpolice Sitka, which could lead to more crime and disorderly conduct. So, he says there has to be a balance.
“We’re trying to figure out what is the Sitka way to police? What is the best way to build trust?” he says. “We go to the same grocery stores, we go to the same restaurants, we fish in the same waters. How do we become part of the community? And I think that’s going to take a little bit while we build that team and figure out a good tempo of how Sitkans want to be policed.”
At the end of the day, Hall says he believes Sitka is small enough with enough good people to accomplish a lot. And although his life wasn’t very quiet before coming here, he thinks he can make a difference in a quiet place.
