LEWISTON – By the end of the day Friday, William Welch will be a civilian. No power of arrest, no access to information about ongoing investigations.

Instead of a lofty title that begins with the word chief, he will be plain old Bill.

“I’ve got to toss them the keys to my car and give back my gun,” Welch said Wednesday. “It’s pretty emotional stuff.”

Welch will end his 11-year reign as chief of Lewiston police on Friday. More than that, he will be outside of the tight police circle for the first time in 33 years – more like 37 if you count his time in the U.S. Air Force.

“I have such mixed feelings,” Welch said. “One day I’m happy about it; the next day I’m not.”

For more than three decades, he has been a cop. Sure, he worked a few jobs at the mills when he was a youngster and he played baseball in the Air Force. But that was long ago – so long ago that Welch may have forgotten what it’s like to not carry a badge.

“This has been my life,” he said.

Since 1998, he wasn’t just any cop, but the highest ranking officer at the second-largest – and some would say most storied – police department in the state. Most things that happened in Lewiston in one way or another had some sort of impact on his office. And he always seemed to have his finger on the pulse.

“Not being in the know will be hard,” he said. “Right now, I know everything that’s going on. Or I think I do, anyway.”

City leaders won’t try to convince Welch that he doesn’t know everything. For 11 years, they have taken advantage of the chief’s vast network of connections, locally and nationally. Welch seemed to know what needed to be done, how to do it and who to call for help.

“At times, we referred to him as our Radar O’Reilly,” said City Administrator Jim Bennett. “He has a lot of resources and knows a lot of people.”

Good times, bad times

Welch took over as chief in the summer of 1998. He has been credited with a robust list of improvements throughout the department and the city itself. Beefed-up community policing, the canine unit and computer crimes investigations took off under Welch’s leadership.

He also got the department directly involved in a number of federal agencies – the Central Maine Violent Crimes Task Force, the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force, the Drug Enforcement Agency and its various arms – allowing his officers to get extra training they can use to combat crime on Lewiston streets.

Not to mention a rate of crime that has dropped steadily in the past decade.

“We’ve done a lot of decent things,” Welch said, as he slowly packed mementos – police hats, an old-style billy club, news clippings and photos – into cardboard boxes. “Our crime rate right now is among the lowest in the state. Some people find that hard to believe.”

But Welch’s time in the big office was not always so smoothly successful. In the beginning, there was turmoil. A lot of it, all at once.

In his first year, Welch was sued by a pair of women from the Abused Women’s Advocacy Project after what was described as a mock choking incident. A former crime analyst accused him of making sexual remarks. A former officer blew the whistle on what he described as the homophobic culture of police work and for things like a cat being tossed into a downtown canal.

Those high-profile cases cast doubt on Welch’s earliest days as chief. He was like a baseball pitcher who gets hit hard in the first inning.

“There are a lot of things I wish had gone differently, obviously,” Welch said.

Those cases were settled in or out of court and the chief and his department scraped their way past the turbulence. New programs were put in place. The department continued to get accredited. It was named by national groups as one of the top 20 departments in community policing and one of the six best in innovation.

If Welch was that baseball pitcher who had a rough first inning, he turned it around and pitched remarkably well for the next eight. As chief, Welch didn’t merely survive, he and the department prospered.

‘Extraordinary’ people

A big test of his leadership came in January 2003. That’s when a group of white supremacists descended on the city in reaction to an influx of Somali immigrants. The gathering on Goddard Road had potential to be trouble. Violence was known to follow that particular group and the gathering was a large one. Protesters were greeted by protesters and thick lines of police in riot gear running interference.

The event did not prove to be violent at all. After weeks of local and national news coverage, it was almost an anticlimax, due largely to the way police handled the confrontation.

“A lot of that was organized by Bill,” City Administrator Bennett said.

So effective was the police handling of the event and the diffusing of potential problems, that Welch’s techniques became a model around the country for other departments faced with similar clashes.

As chief, Welch was of the philosophy that you are only as good as the team you assemble.

“The people here are extraordinary,” Welch said, crediting his staff, from the deputy chief to the patrol officers and civilian workers. “They do a lot of things that they don’t get credit for.”

Welch began as a patrol officer in the scrappy days before police radios and GPS. He knows there are many to credit for his long and fruitful career. Not all of them work for the police department.

His wife, Brenda, and their children, Scott and Hillary, have always known him as a cop. So has his father and an uncle he thinks of as a brother. As long as anyone can remember with clarity, he has been either “Officer” Welch, “Detective” Welch or simply, “The Chief.”

“If I hadn’t had the family I have,” he said, “this job would have been a whole lot tougher.”

But after Friday, there is no job. Welch will travel around the country to assess other police departments. But by then, he’ll be just Bill. No rank or badge.

Not that it’s all bad. Come the weekend, it will no longer be his job to bridge differences between the officers and the people who run the city. When people from out of town spread gross misconceptions about Lewiston, it will not be Welch’s duty to defend the city.

The chief, who maintained an open relationship with the media even in difficult times, will no longer have to stand in circles of reporters to answer their questions. Misconceptions about Lewiston are not his burden to bear, though they still rankle him.

“Sometimes things get blown out of proportion,” he said. “People often like to focus on the negative, not the positive.”

Come Friday afternoon, Bill Welch will give way to Mike Bussiere, the department’s new acting chief. Welch has always had confidence in Bussiere, he said.

“I’m leaving it in good hands,” Welch said.

By late in the day Wednesday, he was perhaps a quarter done cleaning out his office. There was all day Thursday and most of Friday to get it done, and he seemed to be in no hurry. Once the office was emptied of his things, after all, it would mark the beginning of the weird transition from cop to civilian, from Chief to Bill.

Welch has gotten offers from other departments since announcing his retirement. For now, at least, his plans don’t include accepting any of them. He will take his father fishing and visit his son in California. He might even get to sleep without his cell phone nearby and without a police scanner crackling in the background.

That adjustment, though, might be a tough one.

“I’ll hear the sirens out there,” he said, gesturing to the city beyond the window, “and I’ll wonder what’s going on.”