Amber Spaeth
Contributing Writer
Lisa Beecher served at the Portland Police Department for 21 years before retiring in 1998 to become the chief of police at USM. For the past eight years she has worked to make the campus as safe as possible for students, staff and faculty.
What’s it like being the chief of USM’s police force?
I love my job. I think I’m well suited for a university police department. I worked on the streets of Portland for 21 years for the Portland PD [police department], and it was a welcome change to campus policing. This is truly community policing, and that’s what I love. What I really enjoy is working with people and departments, building up partnerships and working on committees and things where a lot of us come together and we all have the same basic goal: to keep everybody safe and secure.
What does ‘doing you job’ entail?
It’s the same as every other chief in the state, we are a police department and my duties include managing the entire department. I’m in charge of all that and managing the budget. Leadership of the department [involves] being responsive to the community needs, recognizing what those are, writing policies and procedures, and working on crisis and disaster plans.
Are there any crimes you put more energy into dealing with than others?
I spent about 12 years as a detective working on domestic violence cases and I brought that knowledge here and we’ve developed a very good response to relationship violence cases on campus. It’s not just students; it’s faculty and staff as well, who cause disturbances. They’re complicated cases but we do everything from the initial reports to going to court with them to get protection orders, [to going] down to the Family Crisis Center. We make sure victims are aware of internal and external sources they might need. We set up personal safety plans and we also provide escorts.
Our staff has been very well trained, and I think we do an excellent job with that.
What other crimes do you deal with a lot?
We make several OUI arrests. They’re not top things, but they concern me because drunk drivers anywhere are dangerous to everybody, and people die, so those are a big concern to me, and we’re making more of those all the time. They’re not just students, sometimes they’re people who are not students. Occasionally in the early hours we’ll have someone cut across our campus hoping to escape the Gorham PD because they’ve been drinking and driving, only to get caught by us.
Did you always want to be in law enforcement?
Yes. I grew up in a small town where we didn’t even have law enforcement, and I just knew from junior high school that’s what I wanted to do. Originally I wanted to join the FBI, but back then women could only be secretaries at the FBI, so I moved down here to start my education at what is now SMCC. I got a two-year degree in law enforcement technology, and then transferred to USM in the psychology program. While I was in that program I saw an ad in the paper that the Portland PD was hiring. They weren’t starting women in the field at that time, so my strategy was that if I applied to the largest department I would have a better chance of being hired, because they would be more apt to hire a woman than smaller agencies that maybe didn’t even have a woman.
Did you plan to spend your career working up in the ranks of the Portland Police?
I was looking at climbing the ladder promotion wise, but then I got married and had two children and that changed everything. I realized I couldn’t do everything now, and there was only one chance with my kids. I decided not to go the promotion route, but [instead] to take a detective position, which meant I could work days and have the weekends off.
Did you ever encounter discrimination as a female police officer?
I remember the first couple of months on the force we had a role call before we went out on our shift. Then after that, the older officers came up to me angry and accused me of taking the job that some man needed to feed his family, and I’m standing there thinking, “What about me? I need to support myself.”
Did the civilian population ever respond negatively to you?
I remember once, it was probably my first or second year as a patrol officer in the Portland PD, I was assigned to take a burglary report. I knocked on the door and when [the woman] saw me and I said I was there to take the report, she was shocked and she said, “I was expecting a man!” and slammed the door in my face. I called dispatch and said that if she still wants to file a report please make sure that you send me because this is my beat. They sent me back, and she apologized and said she was so totally shocked to see a woman in uniform that she had to react like that.