BRUNSWICK

Longtime Brunswick Police Detective Inez Dudley, who retired from the force in 2006 to work for the Maine State Police Computer Crimes Unit, has rejoined the department as a communications dispatcher.

The job brings Dudley full circle, back to the first post she held when the Brunswick Police Department hired her 35 years ago — at a time when women rarely made law enforcement a career.

Dudley worked for 10 years in police communications before leaving the department in 1985 to attend school in New Orleans.

She returned a year later and was hired as a patrol officer before eventually becoming a detective.

While still a Brunswick detective, Dudley became one of the four original members of a task force to focus on computer crimes in Maine.

Along with two Lewiston police officers and a Maine state trooper, she worked a couple of days a week out of the Lewiston Police Department, she said, until the program shifted to the authority of the Maine State Police. Then the office moved to Vassalboro.

In 2006, after three decades with the Brunswick Police Department, Dudley retired and joined the Computer Crimes Unit full time.

She found the work “very different,” but “very satisfying.”

A sixth-generation Bailey Islander, Dudley commuted from her home there to Vassalboro — 90 minutes each way — for three years.

Beginning the week of Dec. 19 — after two weeks of training — Dudley will commute to Brunswick instead. She’ll take her seat in the communications center at the police station she knows so well.

Deputy Chief Marc Hagan said he’s glad to have Dudley back on board.

“It is difficult to make up for the experience and institutional knowledge that we lost when Inez retired, so to have her back on the department is a bonus,” he said Friday.

Dudley also is happy to be back where she started, and has enjoyed reuniting with former co-workers.

“The law-enforcement community is a very close-knit community,” she said. “It’s a very small community and very tight. That thin blue line holds us all together. It binds us in a brotherhood-sisterhood like no other.”