Dover Police Chief Search Narrowed To Three By Search Committee

Dover is getting closer to finding their new police chief after having the search narrowed to three candidates by the Dover Police Chief Search Committee.

The committee met in executive session last night to talk about which of the three candidates they are going to recommend to the Board of Selectmen.

“I think it’s clear that we’ll recommend more than one but the number is undetermined at this time so we’re going to talk about that and we’ll go from there,"  said co-committe chair David Heinlein.

The town received 36 applications for the job, seven of which were interviewed by the committee.

“It was a combination of things. We had a lot of information to go on. We had their resumes, we had their responses to written questions that we had submitted to them, and then, of course, the interviews themselves,” Heinlein said.

After the interview process the committee narrowed their search to three candidates who underwent further assessment on Saturday.

“We held our assessment center on Saturday where we had three finalists for the position come in and we had three acting chiefs, in some capacity, one is actually a chief at a college, and put the candidates through some role playing,” said Heinlein. “All the candidates did terrific but I think it gave us a better sense of where we were with each of the candidates.”

The identities of the three candidates are still being kept under wraps.

“We’ll probably make a recommendation to the board within the next week and then I would expect that, on their own time frame, the board will have a public hearing for those candidates and they’ll be public at that time who they are,” Heinlein said.

Heinlein did say however that the committee was confident in their three candidates' ability to step in as police chief.

“I think that when we got down to this point we knew that all three were capable of doing the job and it was just going to be who we felt was the best fit, or potentially the best fit,” said Heinlein.

“We’re definitely getting closer,” he said.