“I’ve been at Ann Arbor PD since I was a twenty-two-year-old kid,” explains Metzer, who retired as the department’s interim chief in October. “This has just felt like a home to me.” But, she adds, “sometimes an opportunity presents itself, and you don’t know if that opportunity’s gonna come up again.”
The opportunity is a newly created job as director of support services for U-M’s division of public safety and security at Michigan Medicine. “I’ve worked closely with U of M for a very long time, [so] I was kind of given an advance notice,” she says, but “I went through an interview process like everybody else—a very extensive interview process!”
Because police officers qualify for full pensions after twenty-five years, Metzer says it’s “typical for law enforcement” personnel to retire and then take another job. Her predecessor, Mike Cox, now oversees the Boston Police Department.
Though Metzer doesn’t blame Cox, she says the department was “losing people left and right” during his less than three years here. “Through Covid in 2020, through civil unrest and all of the things that were happening during that time, [we] lost, like, fifty officers. We were losing people to other departments, which was unheard of. People were going back to work for Detroit!”
But officers trusted her, she says, and “we’ve done a 180 … People are saying ‘Hey this is a great place to work. You should come and work here’” to cops in other departments.
“She was very well received by the rank and file,” agrees city administrator Milton Dohoney, “and her approach to engaging with them seemed to resonate immediately.”
There were just 102 sworn officers when Metzer became interim chief. There are 107 now and “we should be adding seven more to that mid-November,”
she says proudly. “I would say by this time next year, we will be fully staffed—finally.”
Dohoney praises Metzer’s collaboration with fire chief Mike Kennedy and emergency management staff in responding to the extended power outages during her tenure, and her handling of Jude Walton’s murder in April (see “The Trouble at West Park,” p. 23). “The police department under Chief Metzer’s leadership essentially solved that case in about seventy-two hours,” he says.
Another interim chief, Patrick Ma-guire, has taken over while the city continues to seek a new permanent chief—Dohoney rejected the search company’s first four candidates in August.
“Were they qualified to be a chief of police? Yes,” the administrator says. But “it’s not a question about someone’s qualifications. [It’s] a determination that a city administrator has to make on, ‘Are they the right person at the right time for the job in Ann Arbor?’”
Mayor Christopher Taylor knows what he wants: “A police chief needs to be a consummate professional, needs to be proud of the calling, needs to understand deeply that policing is at a point of transition in American culture, needs to be a leader who both supports and takes pride in the members of the department and also demands accountability of them and themself.”
“You have got to fully embrace transparency, being communicative to the community, being straightforward about the performance of the department,” Dohoney adds. “You need to be someone that is embracing the fact that there is a civilian oversight group in the city. You need to embrace the fact that we’re moving forward with an unarmed response program that will be separate from
police …
“Equally as important, you need to be a person that can relate to the men and women that show up every day that have taken the oath and provide them a vision and direction for where the department is going and what your standards are. You have to be a leader.”
The administrator says the reopened search “is a lot more direct, calling to specific people, by both me and the search firm, asking, ‘Do you have fifteen minutes to talk about the chief opportunity in Ann Arbor, Michigan?’
“I do not intend for the calendar to turn over in ’24 and we don’t know who the chief is,” Dohoney says. “It is something I’m working very hard to wrap up.”
