The police line after Bolerjack: a named silence, then Witkowski and Arendt

1963 – today

The silence, printed whole: Between Bolerjack's last directory (1963) and the modern succession's resumption, the sources reached for this build name no Mishawaka chief of police at all — a silence of some forty years in the city's top uniformed office, printed here at the size the Fire & Safety section gives it, because a people-leg that bridged it with atmosphere would be inventing servants. The men who held the office in those decades exist; the record that names them exists too — the Board of Public Safety's minutes, the Tribune's appointment and retirement notices across the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, and the department's own centenary materials. None was in the record reached, and the gap stands as the largest single shortfall in this section, named with its settling sources rather than papered over.

Witkowski and Arendt, at the size the sister file gives them: The Fire & Safety section owns the modern chiefs' records, and this section keeps their person-lines only. Ken Witkowski Jr. was a captain in the department's hardest week, the December 2003 shootings that killed two of its officers, and became chief soon after; he held the office twenty years — the city's "longest serving Chief in Department history," tested against Bolerjack's directory span in the entry above — across a thirty-six-year career from about 1988; and on 27 August 2024, the day of his retirement as chief, he was sworn into his next city office, Director of Code Enforcement, succeeding Joe VanNevel, himself a servant whose long tenure at that appointed desk is documented only by its ending. Alex Arendt, sworn chief the same day after twenty-nine years in the department, is the chief in office in November 2026. A planned succession, mentored for years, executed in a day: the modern department's service culture in one entry, and the rest of both men's records are the Fire & Safety section's to keep.

Sources:

1. The Fire & Safety section of this history — the middle-century gap named whole, with the Board of Public Safety minutes, the city directories and the Mishawaka City Council Records 1845–1977 at the Hesburgh Libraries as settling sources; the Witkowski and Arendt records and the VanNevel succession from the city's announcements of August 2024.