Plaudits, Questions
On Esserman Pick

(News Analysis) Bringing community policing to New Haven the first time sparked a civil war within the department. Will the city’s new chief be able to bring it back without sparking another one?

That question follows Tuesday’s return appearance in town of Dean Esserman. The one-time New Haven assistant police chief will become the city’s new police chief, the fourth in four years, starting Nov. 16.

At a City Hall press conference, Esserman made clear what he plans to do. Initial reactions, including from some old-line skeptics, suggest that he may have an easier path this time around.

“In my day [New Haven] was the center of the country for community policing. It is time to regain that reputation,” Esserman said. ​“Community policing works.”

Esserman, most recently the chief in Providence, R.I., spelled out some of what that means (since ​“community policing” has at times become a catch-all, often meaningless phrase in public discussion): Cops assigned to regular neighborhood walking beats again. Programs like the one New Haven invented pairing cops with Yale Child Study Center shrinks to work with young kids who witness violence. Acknowledging that gangs exist and dealing with them. Police developing personal relationships with people in neighborhoods and focusing on intelligence-gathering. Cops visiting shooting victims — even in the middle of the night.

“I roll on every shooting,” declared Esserman, who’s 54. ​“I go to every hospital. I go to every wake. I go to every funeral.” He said he expects his officers to do so, too.

After 20 years in the business, Esserman added, he has new tricks to add to that toolkit. The biggest one: He promised to bring the ​“High Point” plan to New Haven.

That’s the gang-violence and drug-dealing strategy that grew out of High Point, N.C. In Providence, Esserman oversaw the federal government’s first successful effort to replicate that program. That strategy has now spread to cities across the country. Under the High Point experiments, police work with federal agencies, probation, family members, and social services to offer two choices to the small group of violent drug-gang members responsible for the majority of homicides in a community. They amass mountains of evidence to lock them up — with a commitment to follow through. But they also offer them a chance to avoid jail and get help to straighten out their lives. The approach has targeted open-air drug markets as well as gangs engaged in deadly ongoing beefs. New Haven officials promised to bring it here a few years ago, then didn’t. (Read about that here, here, and here.)

That strategy is now definitely coming to New Haven, Esserman said.

Will the cops go along — with the whole package?

Civil War

The question emerges because of what happened in the early 1990s, when Esserman and his then-boss, Chief Nick Pastore, brought community policing to New Haven for the first time.

They established walking beats. They indeed visited gang leaders in the hospital when they got shot — and then, with the help of a new neighborhood-fueled intelligence unit, put them and their fellow gang-bangers behind bars for more than a decade. They brought cops up on charges if they brutalized citizens — and then held firm when white cops went on a 48-hour ​“blue flu” and jammed police radios amid a flurry of shootings. Cops accused the new regime of coddling criminals and opposing police.

As New Haveners have called for a return to the old community-policing approach, that part of the happy story usually gets left out.

In some of the initial reaction to Esserman’s appointment, some of the old refrains have emerged. Someone claiming to be a Providence cop blasted Esserman in an Independent comments thread for visiting a shot gang member in the hospital. (When Nick Pastore did that with a gang leader named Montez Diamond, cops erupted in outrage. Diamond’s gang was one of the ones the cops eventually dismantled.)

“To the gang bangers and murderers: Don’t worry; if you find yourself in the hospital with serious wounds, Esserman will be by your bedside holding your hand and telling you that you are safe now,” the person wrote.

“Talk about a slap in the face,” a veteran New Haven cop wrote about Esserman in the same thread. ​“The ship will definitely sink.”

Eventually, Pastore succeeded in overcoming resistance to community policing. It became the city’s policy for more than a decade. Violent crime plummeted. The strategy began to unravel over the past five years. In the past few years, especially in this year’s Democratic primary campaign, people throughout the community called for a return to walking beats and bike beats and reestablished community ties. In response, the mayor recently announced a small return to walking beats, albeit not with cops regularly assigned to a neighborhood, but with temporary moving teams of overtime officers from across the city.

Mayor John DeStefano Tuesday predicted Esserman won’t face resistance in instituting New Haven Community Policing 2.0.

“We know it. There’s a foundation here,” DeStefano said. ​“The men and women [on the force] just want to serve. This is not going to be foreign and alien to them.”

“There won’t be a war. These cops want it. And Esserman, his policing strategies are tried and true. He’s a professional. he knows what he’s doing. And he’s going to be here,” agreed Officer Shafiq Abdussabur, who joined the force in round one. ​“The officers are excited.”

One longtime cop described how his own thinking changed, and how he turned from a Pastore resister to a community policing advocate.

“When you’re a young rookie on the job, you want to get in the car and put on the siren and make an arrest. When you mature, you realize if the community trusts you there isn’t anything you can’t solve,” he said.

He predicted Esserman will succeed.

“I’m happy we have somebody who is going to bring real community policing,” he said. ” A lot of guys don’t know what it’s like to walk and shoot baskets with kids and go up on people’s porches and have iced tea. They just might like what they see.”

“Don’t forget there was a lot of resistance with him because of Nick Pastore. The majority of those people are gone — the people who were older on the job when Nick was here. Listen, at this stage of the game, we’ve got a guy who’s going to come in here and truly be a leader. People are going to get stuff [promotions and assignments] here based on merit.”

However, this veteran officer said he disagrees with Esserman’s call to visit shooting victims in the hospital. ​“Don’t you think that’s a little much? If two guys get involved in a gunfight and one guy gets shot, do you go and say, ​‘Are you OK?’ As a citizen, I don’t think we coddle criminals.”

DeStefano also noted that Esserman is not bringing in a crew of out-of-town deputies. Esserman made a point at Tuesday’s press conference of praising the existing four assistant chiefs and vowed to rely on them. He also spoke of how he made his ​“first call” en route to New Haven to police union President Arpad Tolnay (at left in photo). At that point in the press conference, Esserman left the podium to shake Tolnay’s hand.

“Thank you for taking my call, brother,” Esserman said as cameras rolled.

Afterward Tolnay said they’d had a good conversation.

“He seems very dedicated about coming here and working with everyone,” Tolnay said.

One veteran officer who remains critical of the Pastore/Esserman era to this day said wariness remains of Esserman’s bonafides. ​“We know he was never a street cop and never made a pinch,” said the officer, who for obvious reasons preferred to remain nameless.

The officer said that nevertheless, he sees two differences this time around. First off: Esserman ​“was always pro-cop. It didn’t seem like he came as an adversary to the cops. … Pastore was despised by the rank and file.”

Second: ​“People in New Haven like community policing. A lot of the newer generation cops like community policing. It fell by the wayside, like all things in New Haven, like the bicycle patrol.”

A Guru’s Prediction

Bringing the High Point strategy in particular to New Haven — where gang violence is believed to be behind a record pace-setting string of murders this year — will prove easier than in Providence, predicted David Kennedy (pictured). And Kennedy said he has no doubt Esserman will bring it to the city.

Kennedy, a John Jay College professor, devised the High Point strategy. The U.S. Justice Department hired him to help departments across the country implement it. He has worked with Esserman for 30 years, he said.

“Dean has been one of the national leaders in embracing this new way of doing the work and making it concrete in his city,” Kennedy said in an interview Tuesday.

“There is a new breed of police administrator in this country, the style that Bill Bratton first modeled in New York. Police professionals take over their agencies with the idea their police departments will actually do something powerful and dramatic about crime. They’re not looking for 5 percent improvement over last year. They’re looking for really big improvements.”

Don’t Shoot, Kennedy’s new book on the strategy, includes a chapter highlighting Providence’s force under Esserman as a shining example of how it can work. So have newspaper articles around the country, such as this one.

Kerekes Isn’t Sold; Graves Optimistic

Jeffrey Kerekes, who’s running as an independent in the Nov. 8 mayoral election, offered a more skeptical view Tuesday.

At a press conference outside police headquarters, he blasted Mayor DeStefano’s decision to hire a new chief 20 days before the election.

“He’s very arrogant to think he’s still going to be mayor,” Kerekes said.

The selection of Esserman should have gone through a ​“proper vetting process,” Kerekes said.

“He might be the right person for the job,” he said, but ​“a cloud” hangs over him from Providence.

Esserman has endured widespread criticism from some cops in Providence who disagreed with his approach to policing, as well as from critics such as jailed former mayor-turned-talk radio jock Buddy Cianci, who relentlessly slammed him on the air.

Kerekes noted that Esserman lost a no-confidence vote from the Providence police union and later stepped down — just as Chief Frank Limon lost a no-confidence vote from New Haven’s union and subsequently left the job.

“Why aren’t we hiring a chief from within” the department? Kerekes asked. ​“We have some good people here.”

Clifton Graves, who also ran against DeStefano this year, attended Kerekes’ press conference as a spectator. Afterwards he said he agrees with Kerekes’ criticism of the hiring process. But he praised the choice of Esserman.

Graves noted that in his Democratic mayoral primary campaign this year, he called for a return to ​‘90s-style community policing under the direction of an experienced leader. He said Esserman could be that guy.

“I had a chance to meet Esserman when he was the architect of community policing” in New Haven, Graves said. He said Esserman did a good job.

Mayoral spokesman Adam Joseph argued that ​“the mayor of New Haven has a responsibility to act in the best interests of public safety for all the families of the city. It is incumbent on the mayor to act swiftly and decisively to fill leadership at the top of the department.”

“Family Cops”

In a recent speech, Esserman offered an expanded version of his philosophy of community policing.

He spoke at a ​“summit” sponsored by a group called the Business Innovation Factory. Click on the play arrow to watch.

And click here to read about Esserman’s bout with colon cancer — and how his experience in the hospital spawned an idea to replicate the ​“medical” model in making police departments ​“teaching” places.

“The new family practice in America is policing. The neighborhood doctor who makes house calls might be fading,” Esserman said at the Business Innovation Factory forum. ​“But the police officer who makes house calls and walks the neighborhood and is part of a neighborhood and a community is ascendant.”

“Most crime is little crime, not big crime,” Esserman said. But, he said, it can become big crime — and police need to reestablish a trusting relationship with the public in order to address it.

Esserman comes to New Haven at a time that many in the community have called for a return to the style of community policing he helped usher in during the 1990s along with his then-boss, Chief Nick Pastore.

Esserman spoke to the Business Innovation Factory with, among others, Ben Berkowitz of New Haven’s SeeClickFix. Berkowitz, who was has been outspoken on police issues, came away impressed with Esserman.

“I go to every funeral. .. I go to every wake. I go to every hospital room,” Esserman said. ​“I expect my people to have no life. I expect them to work.”

He spoke of his ​“report cards” for his officers.

“If the community loves you and they’re hugging and kissing you, and murders are going through the roof, you are not going to feel my love,” he said.

“At the same time, if you are doing remarkable work and you have alienated the community, you are not going to feel my love.”

“You need to be connected to the community. They are the ones who give you your authority … At the same time, you have to do what you are given your oath to do, which is … to make it a safer community,” Esserman said.