Jennifer Shockley has been named as Unalaska's next deputy police chief. She replaces Mike Holman, who was promoted to Public Safety Director when Jamie Sunderland retired last month.
Shockley is currently in Virginia attending the FBI National Academy, she's participating in a ten-week course and will return to Unalaska at the end of March. She said the FBI training will be a huge asset for her new job, since it's focused on executive leadership development course.
"Oh, I think it will absolutely help me. They spend a lot of time focusing on issues that are of current concern, managing change, you know, if you're going to bringing new people or new ways of doing things," Shockley said. "There's also a bit of other technical information, depending on the classes you take.
Shockley has been with the police department since 1998. Prior to that she worked for a decade in commercial fisheries and aquaculture in Alaska and Cameroon, and in the early 2000s she served with a United Nations mission in Kosovo.
Since about 2007, one of Shockley's key duties was writing the weekly police blotter. Her witty and pithy descriptions of routine - and sometimes bizarre -police calls in Unalaska and Dutch Harbor garnered fans all of the world. National media outlets such as the Los Angeles Times and NPR have run stories about the Unalaska police blotter and Shockley's talent for turning what's usually a mundane report into must-read non-fiction.
So, the big question is, now that's she's deputy chief, will she continue to write the police log?
"(Laughs) I don't know. I rather doubt it. I think I'm going to have enough on my plate that it will probably get passed on to either Sgt. Bacon or Sgt. Simms," Shockley said.
Shockley says she first came to Unalaska to get some law enforcement experience before applying for the competitive Game Warden Academy in Texas, her home state. But once she moved here, over time, returning to the lower 48 slowly became less attractive that staying in Unalaska.
"I might have thought I wanted to go back to Texas but the reality was I really like where I was at," Shockley said. "I liked what I was doing, and the people I work with, both inside the department and out."
Shockley says in her new role, she hopes to nudge the department into using social media to connect with the community.
"I'm really excited about getting started in the new job. I will have been gone for quite a while by the time I come back and I'm really looking forward to the first few days on the job and kicking off a new career."
