7 make shortlist for LR police chief

Little Rock officials released a list Tuesday afternoon of the seven remaining candidates to replace outgoing Police Chief Stuart Thomas.

Only one of the candidates is a Little Rock officer.

City Manager Bruce Moore revealed the list of seven names culled from 59 applications and said in a statement that he wants to finish phone interviews by the end of the week.

After that, Moore said, he will narrow the list further and bring the finalists to Little Rock, where they will attend public forums sometime in May.

The announcement comes nearly three months after Thomas announced his plans to retire in June and end his nine-year tenure as the head of the state’s largest municipal police department.

Overseeing a department with a $67 million budget and funding for 574 officers, the new chief will be responsible for finishing a department wide overhaul that was financed with revenue from a 2011 sales-tax increase that has funded new cars, equipment, new buildings and more officers.

Of the three internal candidates to apply for the chief’s job, only one, Assistant Chief Eric Higgins, made the first cut.

Alice Fulk and Patrice Smith, both captains who were unsuccessful in their bids for assistant chief two years ago, did not advance in the campaign.

Although Thomas rose through the ranks to head the department, the two chiefs before him, Louis Caudell and Lawrence Johnson, both were from out of state.

Moore, who did not return a call for comment Wednesday, has said in the past that he has no preference when it comes to hiring a chief from within the department or from outside, and said he would ultimately select the most-qualified candidate.

Higgins joined the department in June 1984 as a cadet and, two years later, became a patrol officer in the city’s downtown patrol division.

By 1994, he was promoted to sergeant and was promoted again two years later to lieutenant. In 2001, he was promoted to captain, became an assistant chief in 2006 and has had a stint as manager of every department division since.

Higgins has been in this position before. During the 2005 search to replace Johnson, Higgins was one of 10 finalists announced by Moore’s office, losing out to Thomas.

The only other Arkansan to make the list is Brian Marr, the head of the state’s U.S. Secret Service division.

Marr joined the Little Rock field office in 1989 and has run investigations, provided security for presidents and headed the Little Rock office since 2005.

Marr is the only one of the seven candidates not to have any local law enforcement experience.

Although Moore was not available to talk about Marr specifically, in the past he has said that lack of experience with a local-level law enforcement agency was not a deal-breaker.

Kenton Buckner, an assistant chief since 2011 in Louisville, Ky., touts his role as his agency’s support bureau commander and his command of 400 officers and 170 civilians, among other accomplishments, as qualifications for heading Arkansas’ largest department.

After starting as a beat officer in Albuquerque, N.M., Blaise Mikulewicz became an FBI agent in Miami with a specialization in narcotics and kidnappings.

He was promoted and became a supervisor over a domestic-terrorism unit in Washington, D.C., in 1996, and after rising to the second-highest-ranked agent in Dallas, he took the chief deputy position with the Dallas County sheriff’s office.

Fellow Texan John Ray, who is second in command in the sheriff’s office in Tarrant County, manages 345-sworn deputies, as well as 129 civilians, in the county that is home to Fort Worth and has more than 1.8 million residents.

Before rising to that rank in 2009, Ray worked his way up to assistant chief in the Longview Police Department in Texas.

Ray holds a doctorate in public affairs from the University of Texas-Dallas.

In 2013, Terence Hall ended his 33-year career in law enforcement when he retired from the Kansas City, Kan., Police Department.

Rounding out the list is Lori Sweeney, a deputy chief with the Rockford Police Department.

She joined the Illinois department in 1994 and became deputy chief in 2011 where she oversees internal investigations, runs the department’s crime-data analysis and at times fills in for the department’s chief.

Of five women who applied, Sweeney is the only woman to make the cut. Little Rock has never had a female chief.

The position will pay between $91,038 and $140,199 and requires a degree or an “equivalent” combination of experience and education and also requires city residency.