HANOVER — After serving as Hanover’s police chief for 10 years, Charlie Dennis informed the Selectboard last month that he would be stepping down at the end of the year.

The Nov. 18 announcement was not a surprise. Dennis, who just turned 61, never made it a secret that he hoped to “retire” at the 10-year mark, a decision made all the simpler by a buoyant home selling market that enabled him and his wife to sell their Hanover home at the high end and move back to his native Texas to be closer to aging parents.

“We’ve been talking about this for a couple years, the economy is pretty good, the time is right,” Dennis said in a recent interview in his office at the Hanover police station about the factors behind his decision.

Hanover has contracted with Municipal Resources Inc., a Plymouth, N.H., consulting firm, to search and vet candidates for a new police chief, who would oversee a 21-officer department with a budget of $4.5 million annually and would pay up to about $161,000, according to a recruitment post on MRI’s website.

Houseman said he “ideally” would “like to have someone on board by March.”

(Capt. James Martin, the department’s No. 2, and Lt. Mike Schibuloa, the No. 3, would be the leading inside candidates by virtue of their rank, Dennis said).

Houseman credited Dennis with being collegial and at the forefront of “dramatic changes in policing over the past 10 years, both nationally and in Hanover.” Dennis was early to recognize the safety hazard posed by the swarm of students on electric scooters whizzing down the sidewalks and in “pushing hard” to better light the intersection of Wheelock and Main streets.

Dennis also initiated a program for the police department to meet every term with the leaders of Dartmouth’s Greek houses to discuss “risky behaviors” — from swimming in the river to alcohol consumption at parties — and to urge them, as leaders, to set an example for their members.

“He’s been passionate about caring about the community overall,” Houseman said.

Being police chief in a community dominated by Dartmouth requires a certain political sense. Former Town Manager Julia Griffin said when she hired Dennis a decade ago she set out purposefully to find a police chief from outside the usual New Hampshire pool of candidates.

“We had just come off a tumultuous time in students, alcohol and policing,” Griffin recounted. “Alcohol consumption was coming to be viewed as a public health issue rather than as a law enforcement issue and I just wanted to get a completely new, non-New England perspective in here for a change of pace.”

Dennis said he “did his homework” and was “up for the challenge.”

For a long time, the dynamic between the Dartmouth College community and Hanover police had been tense if not adversarial. One of the first things Dennis did was to put a stop to Hanover police showing up at the Dick’s House campus infirmary when a student had been admitted for excessive alcohol consumption that would require ambulance transportation to the hospital. It had been standard practice for Hanover police to arrive with the ambulance “and then ticket the student for alcohol consumption” while in need of medical care at the campus infirmary.

“There were a lot of complaints (...) I looked around and said, ‘Why are we doing that?’ We don’t do that when someone is taken directly to the hospital. I view Dick’s House the same way: It’s a medical facility,” Dennis said.

That doesn’t mean Hanover gives a pass to students who have violated the law, however.

“We don’t support underage drinking ever,” Dennis said. “We’ll follow up afterward. But when someone is receiving medical care, we are not going to insert ourselves into that process.”

As part of that, Dennis shut down the Hanover Police Department’s in-house alcohol diversion program — an education program that violators of alcohol-related offenses must comply with as ordered by the court — and instead swung it to the restorative justice Valley Court Diversion Programs in White River Junction.

“I looked at why are we doing our own when we have this great program here that everyone else uses. It was taking our own staff time and people coming in on Saturday. And other places could do it cheaper,” Dennis said.

In his resignation letter to the Selectboard, Dennis singled out Griffin for her “steadfast leadership” and expressed “deepest appreciation” to current Town Manager Rob Houseman for his “thoughtful guidance and support.”

Dennis marks as his biggest achievement winning accreditation in 2023 from the Commission on Accreditation for Law Enforcement Agencies (CALEA), a time-consuming, costly and rigorous process that is considered the “gold standard” in accreditation, and which less than 4% of the country’s local police forces achieve.

“We started that process when I got here. It took a long time. We didn’t have the support in place,” Dennis said, ticking off various benchmarks that had to be achieved: preparing a “best practices” directive policies and procedures manual; upgrading the evidence room to national standards; modernizing the dispatch center; creating systems to log, audit and track equipment and, perhaps most important, ensuring and certifying additional officer training.

The budget for officer training when Dennis arrived was $1,000 per year. Today the budget is $32,000 per year.

“We’re ensuring we’re in compliance with a best-practices agency,” Dennis said.

Lebanon Police Chief Phil Roberts said that “as neighboring police chiefs we’ve had a good relationship. (Dennis) calls me. I call him. We bounce things off of each other. He’s been very professional and easy to work with.”

Moreover, Roberts acknowledges, any Hanover police chief faces a unique challenge.

“This job is a lot in any city or town but having a large, Ivy League campus in your town adds a layer for sure,” Roberts said.

Dennis’ final year in charge has seen some controversy after a relatively quiet tenure. The Hanover police response to a May 1 pro-Palestinian demonstration on the Dartmouth College Green at which 89 people — mostly Dartmouth students, faculty and staff — were arrested. In a response that was criticized by many as excessive, Hanover police were joined by “special operations” state troopers in riot gear and armed with truncheons as cameras caught them hauling off peaceful protesters to be charged.

As he has since the arrests, Dennis declined to discuss the police response that day in detail.

In October Hanover issued its “final report” on the August forum, which acknowledged the town needed to do a better job taking into account public views on law enforcement and improve how officials communicate regarding police actions. The report, however, also concluded the police response to protesters on the Dartmouth Green in May was appropriate given the circumstances.

Although she said she might have preferred a different response to the protesters — Hanover police were called in at the behest of Dartmouth administrators — Griffin nonetheless said, “it would be a shame to have an outsized reaction to this in terms of the overall arc of Charlie Dennis’ term as police chief and Hanover. He’s done a wonderful job as police chief in this community.”

Dennis tells a story that he feels illustrates his vision for the department and its officers.

It was about four years into his job in Hanover that Dennis responded with Sgt. Ethan Martin, then a rookie patrol officer, to a domestic call at a Hanover residence where a woman was in distress because her husband had threatened violence before taking off in a vehicle with a shotgun.

When they arrived at the scene the distraught woman was sitting “on a 2-foot rock wall outside her home and crying,” Dennis recalled. Dennis hung back at his cruiser and watched as Martin, a former Marine, approached the woman.

“He got down on one knee and began talking with her at her level,” Dennis recalled. It was “very powerful. Some officers will just stand there, you know, ask questions. But (Martin) was able to connect with her, learn what we needed to find out (about) what happened, and he did it with compassion and empathy.”

“That’s the kind of police officer I want in our department,” said Dennis.

Dennis said he does not know what is next in store for him. He hopes, “after a short break,” to find work either in law enforcement or the private sector. “Anything is possible,” he said.

 Contact John Lippman at jlippman@vnews.com.