Small Town, Big Scrutiny — Fort Bragg’s Process for Selecting a New Police Chief

A town hall. Three public panels. And a meet-and-greet with finalists.

Fort Bragg Police Department (Photo by Sarah Stierch)

For small, rural communities, hiring for high-profile positions of trust—like police chief—presents unique challenges. Information — confirmed or not — can race through coffee shops, supermarket lines, farmers’ markets and Facebook groups outpacing official announcements. That dynamic, City Councilmember Lindy Peters said, came into play when Police Chief Neil Cervenka announced his retirement in August.

“The city manager wanted to make sure we had a completely transparent policy to select the new chief,” Peters said.

Fort Bragg, a general law city, shifted the authority to appoint its police chief from the city council to the city manager years ago, Peters said. “A prospective police chief would probably rather work for one person than five people on a council that rotates every two years,” he said. But that made it even more important to have a clear, public-facing process.

In response, City Manager Isaac Whippy adopted an expanded, multi-panel vetting model. Peters said Whippy designed the structure to counter “charges whether they’re erroneous or not that the police department hasn’t been that transparent.”

A three-panel review and a structured scoring system

Six finalists — narrowed down by a professional recruiter — met with three separate interview panels of at least seven members each. The panels included community members, public safety committee members, the fire chief and police chiefs brought in from outside the region.

Questions were standardized to ensure legal compliance and consistency. “We have to be careful in the interview process,” Peters said. “We stuck to basic police policy and experience.”

Peters and fellow councilmember Scott Hockett served on the community panel. “We started at eight in the morning and didn’t finish until close to five,” he said. After the interviews, each panelist ranked the candidates one through six. The full group later convened to discuss their reasoning, and Whippy took notes and compiled the ratings to compare overall scores.

Notably, the three highest-scoring candidates were all local: interim Chief Eric Swift, Capt. Thomas O’Neal and Cmdr. John McLaughlin.

“That wasn’t because people wanted a local,” Peters said. “The local candidates happened to have the highest scores.”

Community access added a new layer

With recognition that building trust requires broad input, Whippy also hosted a public gathering where residents could meet the finalists and submit optional surveys.

Peters added that Whippy personally called each council member before issuing a press release. “He told us how he came to the decision and then told us who his selection was so that we didn’t have to read about it on social media.”

A difficult job to fill — and an unusually strong field

Peters, who has participated in police chief and city manager searches over his 22 years on the council, said rural recruitment is often difficult. “It’s not that easy to get a qualified candidate who wants to live in a remote area,” he said. “Sometimes the spouse or kids don’t want to live somewhere without big-city amenities.”

But this cycle was different, he said. “I really felt we couldn’t lose with the three finalists. Any one of them would have been fine.”

Peters described O’Neal as someone who “handles the homeless and transient population with the utmost care and respect,” and praised McLaughlin as “the guy who knows people by first name and can calm situations down.” But Swift’s experience, leadership style and work ethic stood out.

A interim chief who worked shoulder-to-shoulder with patrol officers

Peters said that Swift regularly shows up for work at 6:30 a.m. for the shift change. “He actually came in at one or two in the morning to help with a jail transport because the officers were tied up,” Peters said. “That’s pretty rare for a police chief.”

Swift’s résumé includes experience in Santa Rosa, Napa County and Georgia, along with SWAT and military service. Since becoming interim chief earlier this year, Peters said Swift has “really done a good job of providing transparency for the press and the public.”

Mayor Jason Godeke also praised the broad-based process. “It brought a lot of different ways for people to interact with the process and give some input,” he said. “And that just seemed like a really healthy, important way to do something like this.”