The Derry Police Department

The Derry Police Department is the municipal law enforcement agency of Derry, Maine, a small city whose violent-crime rate, as Mike Hanlon's research establishes, is six times that of any other town of comparable size in New England. Throughout the novel, the department is portrayed as institutionally compromised: its officers enforce a curfew during the child-murder cycles but consistently fail to apprehend the killer, dismiss supernatural testimony, and participate in a town-wide pattern of willful forgetting. Chief Andrew Rademacher, who leads the force during the 1984-85 cycle, is killed when a four-hundred-pound iron tramp-chair falls through the attic floor onto his desk, a death that symbolically completes the town's collapse.

Structure and Jurisdiction

The Derry Police Department operates out of the combination police-station-courthouse building, which stands on the edge of the area that later collapses into the Canal. During the 1957-58 cycle, the force is led by Chief Richard Borton, who proposes the seven o'clock curfew at a special session of the City Council after the discovery of Matthew Clements's body; the curfew is adopted unanimously and goes into effect the next day. Borton publicly maintains that the murders of George Denbrough, Betty Ripsom, Cheryl Lamonica, Matthew Clements, and Veronica Grogan are not the work of one person, citing "essential differences in each crime" while declining to elaborate. By the 1984-85 cycle, Chief Andrew Rademacher has succeeded Borton. The department works in close cooperation with the Maine State Attorney General's office and, after the later murders, with a contingent of FBI agents, though Rademacher admits he does not know how many agents are actually in town.

Institutional Failures and Willful Blindness

The department repeatedly fails to solve the child-murder cases that plague Derry every twenty-seven years. During the 1957-58 cycle, Borton's investigation produces no arrests for the murders of George Denbrough, Betty Ripsom, Cheryl Lamonica, Matthew Clements, or Veronica Grogan. The only conviction obtained is that of Richard P. Macklin for the beating death of his stepson Dorsey Corcoran—a domestic crime unrelated to the cycle. In the 1984-85 cycle, Rademacher arrests Harold Earl, a hermit who lives in a shack on Route 7, after John Feury's body is discovered; Earl's clothes are covered with blood, but the blood proves to be deer-blood from jacking, and Earl is sent to Bangor Mental Health Institute after admitting to hallucinations. Rademacher sticks to the theory that Earl is the most likely suspect until the discovery of Jerry Bellwood's body, which bears a message written in blood on a retaining wall. When Officer Harold Gardener and Assistant District Attorney Tom Boutillier discuss the possibility of a clown under the Main Street Bridge during the Adrian Mellon investigation, Boutillier suppresses the testimony, arguing that introducing the clown story would allow the defendants' lawyer to claim Mellon was killed by "a psycho in a clown suit" rather than by Garton, Dubay, and Unwin. The clown is never mentioned at the major trial.

Key Personnel and Their Fates

Officer Harold Gardener, one of Dave Gardener's four sons, is the officer who pulls Adrian Mellon's body from the Canal on the last night of the Canal Days Festival in 1984. His father, Dave Gardener, was the first person to reach George Denbrough after the boy's murder in 1957. Harold Gardener and his partner Jeffrey Reeves interview Don Hagarty, Mellon's boyfriend, and hear Hagarty's account of a clown under the bridge; Gardener later presses Boutillier about the clown, but Boutillier refuses to introduce the evidence. Officer Frank Machen intervenes when John "Webby" Garton threatens Adrian Mellon at the carnival midway, telling Garton to "leave those little gay boyos alone" and warning him that he will be arrested if he continues. Officers Charles Avarino and Barney Morrison interrogate Steve Dubay, using the pretense of friendship to extract a confession while Dubay, who has an IQ of 68 and left school at sixteen, fails to understand the seriousness of the charges. Officer Paul Hughes and his partner question John Garton, who initially refuses to talk about the fair. Chief Rademacher and Assistant District Attorney Tom Boutillier interrogate fifteen-year-old Christopher Unwin, correctly assessing him as the weak link in the chain; Unwin tells them about the clown with the balloons under the bridge, but neither Rademacher nor Boutillier believes him. Rademacher is killed when the four-hundred-pound iron tramp-chair, stored in the attic above his office, falls through the weakened floor onto his desk as he sits reading accident reports. The building had shipped water during the storm of May 31st, 1985, which may have weakened the attic floor.

The Department's Role in the Town's Collapse

The police station itself is damaged during the destruction of downtown Derry on May 31st, 1985. The combination police-station-courthouse stands on the edge of the area that falls into the Canal; while it does not collapse entirely, the upheaval and flood cause structural damage. The department's institutional failure to solve the murders is part of a larger pattern of Derry's collective amnesia and denial. Mike Hanlon, who has been tracking the cycle of violence, notes that the murder rate in Derry is six times the rate of any other comparable New England town, and that children disappear at the rate of forty to sixty a year, with the rate shooting nearly out of sight during the cycle years. When Hanlon shows Chief Rademacher the statistic of one hundred and seventy child disappearances in 1930, Rademacher dismisses it as a Depression-era phenomenon; when Hanlon shows him the picture of three-year-old Chad Lowe, who disappeared in April 1958, Rademacher fixes him with a sour glance and ends the conversation. The department's refusal to see the pattern is itself a symptom of the town's deeper sickness.