SCARBOROUGH — After 44 years at the Scarborough Police Department, Chief Robert Moulton announced he will be retiring on July 3.

Moulton made his plans to retire public on March 4 on the Scarborough Maine Police Department Facebook account. The post has received 790 “likes” and over 500 comments.

“I’d been thinking about it for some time, and I had shared it with the human resources director and the town manager and a couple of key members of staff, but the rest of the folks didn’t know,” he said. “I had been carrying it around for a bit, and it was nice to get it out and move forward.”

Moulton, a Scarborough native, began working for the police department in 1978, when officers were working out of a small section of the old Public Safety building, which had two offices, a couple of cells, one desk for paperwork and no space to conduct interviews, he said. The building saw expansion in 1989.

After the new Public Safety building was finished last year at 275 U.S. Route 1, Moulton wanted to spend some time in the facility before retiring, he said.

“That was a lengthy process to get that going and get the building actually built,” he said. “I think it was no surprise to anybody that once it was built, I wanted to spend a little bit of time in it and enjoy it.”

The town intends to identify Moulton’s successor before his retirement date, Town Manager Tom Hall said in an email.

“We will have the job announcement/advertisement, soliciting internal and external candidates, by the end of this week (March 12),” he said. “We expect a six-to-eight week posting period and will have a combination of town staff, elected officials and law enforcement professionals involved in the selection process.”

Becoming police chief in 1999, Moulton said he has been most proud of the culture his department has developed over the years. Officers and staff have a strong desire to help people, utilizing different means to achieve this goal.

“I think anytime we hire a police officer, one of the questions is obviously, ‘Why do you want to be a cop?’ and the answer is always, ‘Well, I want to help people,'” he said. “But often times what that really means is, ‘I want to help people when I think they need help and how I think they need help,’ and I think we’ve developed a culture here where we’ve changed that a bit. It’s not about what we think. It’s about meeting people where they are and helping them when they need help.”

The department has developed a number of programs to combat societal issues like drug addiction, he said. Operation HOPE assists residents with substance abuse disorder, offering encouragement, and the program has put over 450 people into treatment.

The LEAD Program, standing for Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion, is a system that allows officers to refer people for aid for underlying issues like mental health, substance use or homelessness, he said.

“People who might have a minor offense or something, rather than just run them through the system, officers have the option to make a LEAD referral and allow the person we have overseeing that to maybe get somebody the help they really need,” Moulton said.

These type of assistance methods allow officers to see “why someone is bleeding,” rather than just “sticking a band-aid on the problem,” he said.

The department hired a social services navigator a couple of years ago who assists with more than just the police, Moulton said.

“Certainly, she’s embedded in the police department, but it’s to help all of the town departments and so forth when they run across people who are facing societal issues that they’re struggling with,” Moulton said. “Again, that might be homelessness, might be substance use, may be mental health. It may be a variety of things. So when people are up against those things, rather than just dealing with the consequences of minor crimes or something they may commit, we’re trying to instead engage them in some resources and programs that might help them with the underlying issues.”

This developing culture in the department is what Moulton said he finds the most notable.

“There are lots of accomplishments over time, whether that be solving a big crime or getting a number of our folks into the FBI National Academy,” he said. “There’s lots of things like that we can look at, too, as successes or accomplishments, but I think what I’m most proud of is that I really feel like we have a department that truly has a lot of folks who really want to help people on the level that they need help.”

When thinking back on changes he’s seen over the period of his career, Moulton has seen calls like domestic violence situations become more complicated and involved, where officers spend more time at the scene, he said. He has also found that there is a larger scope of which officers need to be more aware.

“A young person, let’s say, might need to be aware of some particular person down the street or something like that who might be a bad person, but now in today’s world, not only do they have to be aware of the person down the street, but they have to be aware of people all over the world,” he said. “Technology being what it is, it’s so easy to reach out and touch people in a bad way whether that’s financially or human trafficking or any number of things, drugs and guns and all kinds of different things.”

After nearly 44 years of waking up almost every morning and putting on a uniform or a suit, Moulton is ready to spend some time at home, working on projects for his wife, and spend time at the lake over the summer, he said.

“This type of work is something you live with,” he said. “It’s not a 9-to-5 job where you punch out and don’t worry about until you get back tomorrow. It’s the kind of job that’s always there, always in the back of your mind.”

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