WILTON – Dennis Brown didn’t set out to become a cop. Not at first, anyway.

Growing up in the North Carolina countryside surrounded by relatives’ farms, Wilton’s new Methodist police chief set his sights on either teaching or ministry.

“I majored in religion and philosophy,” he said. He wanted to help people, he said.

But in the midst of his studies Brown had an epiphany, of sorts.

“I decided I could do more good one-on-one as a cop,” he said.

So he transferred, and began studying criminal justice. Moving to a discipline that favored logic and analytical thinking over creativity was a little tough, Brown said, but he was in it for all the right reasons.

He remembers in-class discussions about what types of things to say in job interviews when the students were asked why they went into the field.

“They teach you to say it’s because you want to help people,” Brown said. “That’s the standard answer.” For him, though, it was just the plain, unvarnished truth – and his experiences working since then have only served to bear that out, he said.

It’s a more direct, down-and-dirty way of helping than, say, teaching. “Oftentimes, you’re seeing people at the lowest point in their lives,” he said. “You can either make a positive difference, or a negative difference. If you have a good officer who cares, he can take an action that will positively affect that person’s life.”

“You can do that on a daily basis, if you choose to.”

Brown remembers the first time in his career when he saw that philosophy bear fruit. It was a few years after arresting a young woman on marijuana-related charges. She’d been going through an extremely rough time, he said – had dropped out of college and was just kind of blowing in the breeze. Three years later, she came to the station and tearfully thanked him for arresting her.

The arrest had forced her to talk to her parents about her problems. She’d wound up graduating from college, and was married with a child by the time she came to see him, Brown said.

“It’s a little ironic,” he chuckled. “You don’t get many people who hug you for arresting them.”

Now almost 33, Brown’s a newlywed, and fell in love with Maine on a vacation here with his wife Amanda. “When we talked about getting married, we had some honest conversations, and it was an easy decision for us to come to the conclusion Maine was where we wanted to be.”

When former chief Wayne Gallant resigned his post to become Oxford County’s sheriff, Brown was hired by unanimous vote by selectmen. He took a pay cut in accepting the job, he said, but the benefits of the change outweigh that.

He left his job as chief of police in Windsor, Vt., in mid-January.

Soon after taking up his post last month, though, Brown was hit with a letter from District Attorney Norman Croteau, directing the Wilton department to send all the town’s child sex abuses cases to the Franklin County Sheriff’s Department for investigation.

Brown acknowledges there are areas his department can improve upon.

“They gave me a list of concerns that were sobering,” he said of a meeting with the DA’s office. “I came back and started to evaluate, and saw where there were areas for noticeable improvement.”

Specifically, report writing, prosecution preparation, response to calls for service and preliminary investigative techniques need work, he said.

“We recently concluded a 3-hour block of instruction on effective report writing, case preparation, and initial investigations,” he said.

“The issues are correctable,” Brown said. “It’s not an impossible task, but it’s going to be a difficult task.”

And how does he feel about stepping into what many in this area feel is an extremely controversial issue?

People expect more from police now than they did 20 years ago, Brown said. And that’s a good thing. “It forces the law enforcement community to … look within ourselves as professionals and see our shortcomings. The demands keep my profession growing and improving.”

And the local community, from townspeople, to other law enforcement officials, to his own guys, has been wonderful, he said.

“They’ve gone out of their way to offer help and guidance,” he said. “And the officers here give from themselves.” They helped him move and bought him groceries, Brown said.

Whatever the controversy about the department, Wilton’s officers are great guys, Brown said. “They’ve been wonderful. They’re really quality people. They’d give you the shirt off their back.”