Lebanon — Before Richard Mello became the city’s police chief in December, he served in Concord and Manchester, the city where two officers suffered nonfatal injuries in a shooting on Friday morning.

But if Mello, who still knows members of the Manchester department, was shaken by the news, he didn’t show it.

“We accept that as part of the job,” he said by phone on Friday afternoon.

Manchester officers Ryan Hardy and Matthew O’Connor both are expected to recover.

The Manchester incident came on the heels of controversy over footage showing officers beating a suspect apparently surrendering after a 50-mile pursuit that ended in Nashua, N.H., on Wednesday. Two state troopers — one from New Hampshire, one from Massachusetts — have been suspended and are under investigation.

For area police chiefs, the combination of the shooting and the Nashua incident highlighted an eternal balancing act in community policing: ensuring the safety both of officers and of those they serve.

“I’ve been a police officer since 1988,” Enfield Chief Richard Crate Jr. said Friday afternoon, and “the dangers of the job are there.”

The challenge for law enforcement, he said, is to make sure “we’re safe, but at the same time, we don’t make the public think that we think every car we walk up to contains someone who’s going to hurt us.”

“The way we deal with that,” Mello said, “is by providing (officers) with a great deal of training, by providing them the tools to do the job.”

“We always welcome the scrutiny,” he said, “because it’s an affirmation that we’re doing the job the right way” — meaning, he said, that observers will find that “we handle ourselves professionally and we’re transparent.”

Regarding transparency, he added, Lebanon police cruisers have two video cameras, one facing forward and another covering the back seat, and officers carry audio microphones on their uniforms.

But despite the recent attention to police behavior, both Crate and Mello said their departments weren’t feeling any extra strain. Crate noted that the ubiquity of smartphones has created an expectation among police that anything they do might end up being recorded and widely shared.

“We have to be better than what we saw the other night,” Crate said of the Nashua footage.

Regarding the Manchester shooting, Crate mused about what it means when a police officer is shot — about “what the cause is to our society.”

“If somebody harms a police officer,” he said, “what are they going to do to another person?”

Although Crate has spent his entire career in Enfield, he knows the Manchester chief, and he expressed his sympathies.

“Police officers around the country — we come together,” he said. “When a police officer’s injured, whether it’s somebody in your own department or elsewhere, we’re there for each other.”

Rob Wolfe can be reached at rwolfe@vnews.com or 603-727-3242.