It was an average day in an average week and I was skulking around at the Lewiston police station. Straining to overhear scuttlebutt, eyeballing stray reports in the periphery. You know: skulking.

The new police chief walked in and admonished his officers.

“Don’t let LaFlamme just wander around in here like that. He skulks.”

“What?” I protested, indignant. “No, I don’t.”

I do. I skulk, and Mike Bussiere knows it. He also knows that when I claim that I got a juicy bit of information from some random guy on the street, it’s more likely I got it from one of his guys. And he calls me on it every time.

Bussiere is a very sagacious chief. Too sagacious for the likes of me, surely.

I should have resented the hell out of Bussiere’s rise to the top back in 2009. In many ways, it marked the end of playtime for me. I had to stop treating the police station like my personal playground and most of my old reporter tricks no longer seemed to work.

Bussiere caused me to work harder, it’s true, but I also began to sleep better at night. Slept a LOT better, as it turned out, and it had nothing to do with crack dealers or home invaders.

A lot of people see Bussiere’s great success in the radically dropping crime rates and the vast improvement in police-citizen relations. Those things are awesome and all, but from my perspective, Bussiere wasn’t just standing guard against garden-variety villains, he was standing guard against anybody who threatened the freedoms of the people he served. Against tyranny, in other words.

“Everyone who knows me knows that my first professional allegiance is to the United States Constitution, and all of the amendments, not just the ones that suit certain people,” the chief told me once. “My views on policing and public service are tempered by the fact I won’t always be a cop and won’t always be a chief, so I look at things first and foremost as a citizen.”

He isn’t like those blustery politicians who prattle on about the Constitution during campaign season and then promptly forget about it once the election is in hand. Bussiere knows what the words on that old parchment mean and he embraces them.

Every single time Bussiere talked about the origin of his Operation Hot Spots, he described taking guns away from felons in downtown Lewiston while also stressing that his department had no interest in bothering people who legally keep guns for self-defense. He didn’t have to say that. Many of the people who turn out to hear Bussiere speak would just as soon see ALL guns gone, not just the illegal ones. But the chief believes in the Second Amendment and he always understood that it was his job to protect it.

Not to mention the First Amendment, the Third, the Fourth, the Fifth — all of them. It wasn’t just the safety of his citizens Bussiere was looking out for, but their liberty, as well.

And damn if I didn’t sleep like a baby knowing that he was on that wall.

A couple years ago, I wrote a column about the emerging police state and the many abuses citizens around the country had suffered at the hands of bully-minded cops. In the wake of that column, several people approached me, wincing, and asked why I would write such a thing, knowing that I have to work alongside police every day.

Wary, I wrote to Bussiere about it and asked for his opinion on the column.

“I didn’t see it as anti-police at all,” he said. “It’s more anti-militarization.”

Imagine that. He got it. I guarantee you that there are plenty of cops heading plenty of departments who firmly believe that if a reporter is against the ongoing militarization of police, he’s against cops in general and must be shunned. But Bussiere is keenly aware of the growing chasm between police and the citizens they serve. He recognizes that there are good people and bad people on either side.

So, yes, I slept like a drunk baby night after night, always reasonably certain that no jack-booted, brown-shirt cop was going to come to my door in the wee hours demanding to see my papers and seizing my property under the name of homeland security.

Lewiston has had some fantastic police chiefs before Bussiere and I expect they’ll have another once he’s gone. But Bussiere took the reins just as the police state was coming into view nationally and clashes between cops and citizens were becoming commonplace.

While entire cities were going up in flames in other parts of the country, Lewiston was experiencing a period of relative peace. To my eye, the integrity of the Lewiston Police Department hit an all-time high under Bussiere’s leadership and, at least in this tiny little speck on the globe, true liberty was still a priority and both crime and the police state were kept at bay.

Mark LaFlamme is a Sun Journal staff writer. He is always skulking for intel, even in his drunken-baby sleep. Email him at mlaflamme@sunjournal.com.

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