Village Public Safety Officer

Monte LaVelle Chitty, age 62, was arrested on April 5 in a small town in Texas by state police and U.S. Marshals, after attempting to flee child-abuse related charges in the Florida Keys. He was arrested in March and charged with two felonies involving a 15-year-old girl from the Baptist church he was leading in Marathon, Florida. Those include sexual battery and lewd and lascivious molestation, and a misdemeanor of contributing to the delinquency of a minor.Chitty was also a former Alaska Village Public Safety Officer in the Aleutian region for several years and a pastor in Cold Bay for a short period. He moved to Alaska and began leading the Cold Bay Chapel in 2010.

After nearly two years without a stable police force, the remote Pribilof Island community of St. Paul is welcoming new Village Public Safety Officers. City Manager Philip Zavadil said he thinks the transition from a police force to public safety officers will be a good change for the remote community. “Not only is it a good fit for St. Paul, I think for most of rural Alaska, it's a better fit because we're not big [cities],” Zavadil said. “We have different problems, different ways of resolving those problems, different challenges.”