Faces Of Nantucket: Jerry Mack

Officer Jerry Mack took his final patrol around downtown Nantucket on Friday as a member of the Nantucket Police Department.

After 30 years in uniform - starting as a summer special in the early 1990s through his time as a detective and finally as the department's downtown patrol officer - Mack is turning in his badge and calling it a career.

Born and raised on Nantucket, Mack is now 55, and he said this week that it was a great honor to have helped keep his hometown safe over the past three decades. He expressed gratitude for his family, fellow officers, and the island community as he prepared for his next chapter outside of law enforcement.

Mack said he knew it was time to retire, but it's still difficult for him to imagine not putting on the uniform again.

"The whole thing right now is surreal," he said. "I was at the Barnstable County retirement office doing all the paperwork, and I walked out the door, and I'm like, 'What did I just do?' Just like that, it's over? It's the strangest feeling in the world. But everybody you talk to that's been through it says you've just got to do it. It was the right thing to do." 

When Mack started with NPD in the early 1990s, the police station was still on South Water Street, Randy Norris was the chief, and technology like tasers, cell phones, dash cams, and body cams were still years away.

"It was a totally different time," he recalled.

Mack served as a detective from 1998 through 2006, a period that he recalls vividly as the police department combated a new player in the drug scene on the island.

"The crack element that came here at that time, that was the defining moment in my career," Mack said. "During that time, that's really all I did, non-stop, was drug cases and investigations. It was coming over by the kilo, and that's the one thing that I'll take from all this is the work that I did on that with some of the other detectives. It was full-time, and it was bad.

"The drug work I did, particularly with addicts, I dealt with so many of them, and they still, to this day, will call me and thank me for helping them," Mack added. "I look back on that, just the sheer volume of crack and coke we took off the streets that was huge for me."

After the births of his two daughters, Natalie and Amanda, Mack relinquished the detective role to be able to spend more time with his young family and returned to NPD's patrol division.

In 2020, former Nantucket Police Department chief Bill Pittman carved out a new role within the department - the downtown resource officer - and knew that Mack would be a perfect fit. Over the past four years, Mack has been a constant presence in the downtown area, assisting the department's community resource officers and becoming a familiar face among the businesses and tourists as he responded to all manner of calls for service during the busiest times of the year.

"It was a good way to cap off the career," Mack said. "I used all of my experiences and knowledge to do that part of the job... I learned a lot from it, and I'm gonna miss it. I love that part of the end of the last four years of this job."

Mack has also picked up a side gig over the past few years: playing drums in his daughter's band "Local Notes." When he wasn't patrolling the downtown area, Mack could be found playing with the band at Cisco Brewers or the Rose & Crown during its regular summer gigs.

With his retirement now at hand, Mack's family home on Polpis Road is for sale, and he is planning on moving off-island with his wife Becky over the next year to be closer to her parents in upstate New York.

"We're ready to move on from it," Mack said. "We want to just get off the island and go somewhere else. Her parents are in upstate New York. They're aging. She wants to get close to them. So yeah, it makes sense, and we'll figure it out."