BY MATTHEW MORIARTY: Staff Writer

John Letteney won’t say what happened.

Whatever it was, it affected him to the point that he won’t say publicly what his wife’s name is, how many children he has or even what high school he graduated from in upstate New York.

That’s because at some point, during his 25 years in law enforcement, someone tried to hunt for him at home.

Letteney is the new police chief in Southern Pines. He won’t risk letting the same thing happen here.

“You deal with people when you’re in law enforcement under different circumstances,” Letteney says. “Some people you have negative contact with. I’ve had some experiences.”

He refuses to be more specific. It makes sense for someone in law enforcement to keep his private life private, he says. Though he has had to make sacrifices, Letteney says he has never seriously considered another career.

He now occupies the corner office at the Southern Pines Police Department in the municipal building on Service Road off U.S. 1 near Morganton Road.

The slender and youthful-looking Letteney wears a gray suit with a pink-striped shirt and a gray tie.

The chairs for visitors in his office are against the wall, a good six feet from his desk. It gives the office an empty feel, as though Letteney hasn’t finished moving in yet.

The office is far from empty. Plaques from the Monroe County (N.Y.) Sheriff’s Office thanking him for his service since 1981 adorn the wall. One plaque thanks him for his leadership of the SWAT team.

On his desk, side by side, are an iPod and a Palm Pilot. The Palm Pilot reminds him of his father.

Letteney’s father was a computer programmer back before most people knew what that meant. He worked for IBM. Letteney was born outside Boston.

The super-computers his father worked on those days were the size of buildings. They used tape drives. Most of the computers his father worked on when Letteney was a little boy don’t have the memory of the Palm Pilot that now sits on his desk.

At some point, and Letteney won’t say when, his family moved to upstate New York. Letteney played soccer in high school.

He says he still likes playing and being active with his children. He scuba-dives, skis and hikes with them.

‘You Can Have an Impact’

Letteney says he knew at an early age that he wanted to go into law enforcement.

“I felt like I belonged in the law-enforcement profession,” he says. “I wanted to have an opportunity to make a difference, to solve a problem, to leave a situation a little better than I found it.”

Letteney began working for the sheriff’s office in 1981 when he was still in his early 20s. He worked part time while attending college to earn a bachelor’s degree. He married right out of college.

He continued his education while working with the sheriff’s office, earning a master’s degree in public administration with a concentration on criminal justice in 2003.

The Monroe County Sheriff’s Office is the largest sheriff’s office in New York, he says. It is divided into specialty bureaus.

“I never wanted to be in anything but the police bureau,” he says. “And I’ve been in the police bureau ever since.”

After graduating from college, he moved from part-time to full-time work. He worked patrol for a number of years.

Many cadets think they are going to change the world, Letteney says. You learn quickly on the job that you can’t change the world, but you can have an impact.

“What you can do is, you can change someone’s world,” he said. “If you change someone’s world today, then it’s a good day.”

Letteney uses the phrase, “then it’s a good day,” again and again, as if at the end of every day he decides if he did his best. Only then does he decide if it has been a good day or not.

It’s easy to imagine that if he decides it hasn’t been a good day, he returns tomorrow with more vim than ever.

Holding a guilty party accountable for a crime, making a victim feel safe, helping a juvenile learn to make the right decisions are the things that make good days, Letteney says.

Climbing the Ranks

Letteney’s attitude helped him move up through the ranks. He became a training officer, then joined a motorcycle unit. He still rides today.

“That was one of my favorite assignments,” he says.

He worked in the academy and did some undercover work. The sheriff’s office was in charge of security for the Greater Rochester International Airport. When Letteney became a sergeant, he became a supervisor at the airport division.

Letteney later worked with the training unit, doing recruit selection. He was promoted to lieutenant and moved to investigations, working on murders, rapes, robberies, arson and vice crimes.

When he became a captain, he was put in charge of a substation. In many ways he was like the chief of the substation, or a sheriff of a small county. Seven towns and the airport were under his jurisdiction. He had a staff of nearly 100.

During 13 of those years, he was also on the SWAT team. First he was with an entry team. Later he worked as team leader and a sniper.

“It made life a little busy,” Letteney says.

In New York, law-enforcement officers are eligible for retirement after 20 years. Letteney had 24 years when he decided to move on.

Feels at Home

He and his wife had talked about moving to the Carolinas for 15 years, he says. They have family in the Triangle and always liked the area.

Getting a job as a chief was the next logical step, he says. He spotted the advertisement for the Southern Pines job and after researching it decided it was a good fit. He says he turned down some other offers to take the Southern Pines job.

“This was really my first choice,” Letteney says.

Oddly enough, Letteney says Southern Pines is a lot like the place he worked before coming here.

“It was a metro area,” he says. “There is a lot there, but what it is, when you boil it down, is a lot of small communities. This feels comfortable to me.”

His philosophy for the Police Department is continued improvement, he says. He thinks the department does many things well, particularly from a technology standpoint, but his goal is to improve on those things.

Working with the community is key, Letteney says. Like most towns, Southern Pines has a drug problem. If the community decided that it couldn’t stand the problem any more, it could use the police to eradicate it, he says.

“The crime picture in Southern Pines seems to be typical,” Letteney says. “It’s similar to any other community in any other town anywhere in America.”

Though people in Southern Pines think they don’t have to lock their cars, they really should, Letteney says. They shouldn’t tempt criminals like that.

“It’s a lot easier when the car is unlocked,” he says.

When people see something suspicious, they shouldn’t hesitate to call the police. It’s never a bother, Letteney says.

“I’d rather respond 100 times and have it be nothing,” he says, “than to miss that one time that someone is trying to break in.”

About People

Letteney says every case he worked on has helped form his philosophy on police work. The key is to remember that it’s about people, he says. It may be routine to an officer, but it isn’t to a victim.

He remembers once working with a man who kept having his mailbox knocked down. To Letteney, it was a minor issue. But to the man, it was important. Letteney came up with a relatively simple solution.

“He was so thankful,” Letteney says. “Most of the time it’s not major crime. It’s quality of life issues. ... In police work, you have to be problem-solvers. When you can work within the constraints you have and use the resources you have to solve a problem, then you’ve done a good thing.”