PICK ONE AND BACK AWAY: Tommy, you need to look to other cities, pick a qualified outsider, and let that person do his or her job — three things you did not do with Kathleen O’Toole.
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The Honorable Mayor Thomas A. Menino:This fall, you will play host to some 15,000 members of the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP). Surely someone among them could run the Boston Police Department (BPD).
Hiring someone from the outside world would go against decades of parochial Boston tradition and run counter to every instinct you have ever shown as mayor. That’s why everyone expects you to act swiftly in naming a successor to departing commissioner Kathleen O’Toole. One City Hall insider says flatly that there will not be a full-scale nationwide search, adding that “there is a sense of urgency about this.” The only question most people have is whether the job will go to your buddy Robert Dunford or to a Dunford ally, with Dunford second in command.
Tom: take a deep breath. Count to ten. Think serene thoughts.
This is a time to do it right, not fast.
The sense of urgency is understandable but grossly inflated. A few rudderless months — hardly a departure from the status quo — is a small sacrifice for getting what the city badly needs: someone with real leadership ability, breadth of experience, fresh ideas, and, perhaps most important, no baggage. Someone who demands actual results, and gets rid of those who don’t produce. Not someone who will, as O’Toole did this January, stand and nod as Daniel Coleman, head of the country’s worst homicide squad, tells the city at a press conference that there is nothing his unit can do to improve the arrest rate, except hope that citizens start turning in killers.
Let people throw stones at you for taking your time. You don’t face re-election until November 2009. You are trusted in the neighborhoods most affected by the shocking rise in violence.
Of the 50 largest US cities, 14 hired their current police chiefs from outside the city, according to Phoenix research. That includes six of the 16 chosen in the past two years: the top cops in Albuquerque, Charlotte-Mecklenberg, Dallas, Houston, Nashville, and San Antonio.
You might want to call Shirley Franklin, your counterpart in Atlanta. The FBI had named her city America’s most violent for three straight years when, in 2002, Franklin reached outside the city to hire Richard Pennington, the highly respected New Orleans police chief. Pennington reorganized and reinvigorated Atlanta’s badly dysfunctional police department. Homicides dropped from 152 in 2002 to 89 last year.
The closest Boston has come to bringing in a commissioner from the outside was when it hired William Bratton, in 1993. Bratton, a BPD veteran, had left to run New York City’s Transit Authority police department. At Mayor Ray Flynn’s begging, he returned to save a scandal-rocked BPD, becoming second in command to Francis “Mickey” Roache in 1992, and taking over the following year when Roache resigned. Bratton so stood out from his predecessors and successors that his reign is thought of as a golden age, even though it lasted less than six months, at which point he returned to the Big Apple.
Today, the department is floundering, with problems both internal and external. Units don’t share information with one another; commanders implement competing crime-fighting philosophies; and residents know that the thugs, not the law, control the streets.
If you think the department is essentially fine, Mr. Mayor, by all means promote from within. But if you think it has “a real or perceived need for organizational change,” then you’ve got what Kim Kohlhepp, of IACP’s executive-search practice, describes as a typical case for hiring someone from the outside world.
To say that the BPD has grown stale would be an understatement. Schroeder Plaza is brimming with age-old cliques, rivalries, favoritism, and paranoia. Almost everyone in the building has spent his or her entire career there, and as a result, nobody can see the problems sitting right in front of them.
This is why, for example, the department can have a thoroughly incompetent latent-fingerprint lab without anybody doing anything about it for some 30 years. Or why the department can congratulate itself for an “Unsolved Shootings Project” that resulted in a dramatic increase in unsolved shootings. Or why the department can send completely unqualified ballistics “experts” to testify against hundreds of defendants in court.
Exacerbating the problem, half the people in this town think they personally rescued Boston from the violence of the late 1980s and early ’90s. Members of the original TenPoint Coalition think the ministers’ intervention was responsible for the so-called Boston Miracle; Paul Joyce credits his own Operation Ceasefire; the US Attorney’s office (now under Michael Sullivan rather than David Stern) thinks that federal prosecutions turned things around. And so on.
They are all certain that they need advice from no one in order to confront the current problem. But with the city on track for 400 shooting victims this year — a level not seen since 1994 — they are clearly wrong.
