City’s Star Community Cop Packs it In

The Hardy Boys started young Holly Wasilewski on the path to a police career, a path that came to feature human interaction more than baby powder and scotch tape.

As an 11-year-old growing up in Derby, Wasilewski ​“made myself a Hardy Boys detective. I had a badge and I had a little box of baby power in it and a magnifying glass and tape. My girlfriend and I would go to try to make fingerprints. Her father made us badges.”

Wasilewski indeed grew up to be a cop, a New Haven cop. And she put those fingerprinting skills to use.

But she made her mark more for the relationships she developed with people on the street, especially in the Hill neighborhood. She joined the force as New Haven was forging a ​“community policing” approach. She is retiring this week, after 20 years and eight months on the job, as perhaps the most visible face of that approach. The soft-hearted but no-nonsense cop everyone knows and trusts. Wasilewski gathered bedspreads and pillows for families whose kids don’t have them, threw Christmas and Easter parties at the substation, groomed younger female cops, and helped the feds catch drug-gang leaders and make streets safe again to walk on. When officials came from, say, Tajikstan, to watch New Haven’s model in action, the brass made sure they rode with Wasilewski.

So Wasilewski isn’t the only one shedding tears as she endures her good-bye rituals at the department this week. The city’s losing a star. And people know it.

“She’s done a phenomenal job,” remarked Mayor Toni Harp. ​“In every community, people absolutely love her. She showed that a woman can lead; she’s a role model to many young women on the force and who may want to be on the force.”

In a parting interview on WNHH radio’s ​“Dateline New Haven,” Capt. Wasilewski, who’s 49, offered advice in trust-building for the next generation of community cops.

“Treat others like you’d like to be treated, always,” she said. ​“Be safe. Be good to yourself — it’s very important to treat yourself well, too. If you don’t take care of yourself, you can’t take care of anybody else.” Wasilewski learned all that in New Haven, starting on Congress Avenue.

Made For TV — Or Real Life

Wasilewski’s exploits — down to taking under her wing a young motherless girl she met on the job, à la Lucy Bates in the ​‘80s hit program Hill Street Blues—- have sometimes sounded like scenes in a TV drama. As one observer recently noted, if you saw some of these scenes on TV, you’d shake your head and say, ​“That doesn’t happen in real life.”

Take the time in 2012 when two men believed to be involved in an armed robbery ran from the cops into an apartment on Davenport Avenue. They barricaded themselves inside. The SWAT team arrived, ready to break down the door. A street outreach worker on the scene got one of the barricaded men on the phone; the man said he’d come out if he could talk to Wasilewski, who knew his mother. Wasilewski took the phone. She walked inside the building and called to the door, then took him step by step through the process of surrendering without having a confrontation with the SWAT team.

That really happened.

So did the 2013 courtroom drama in which the city’s deadliest killer was on trial, and the state’s key witness had lost his nerve to testify in the face of death threats. He knew and trusted Wasilewski; she had once helped his family find needed help for its pet pit bull. She went to talk to him, reassured him about his safety. He reconsidered. He testified. The killer was convicted.

Even cats owe Wasilewski some of their seven lives.

So did an incident last December, when Wasilewski intervened in a police manhunt. Wasilewski was at a funeral at the time in Evergreen Cemetery. She heard on the radio that police were chasing a man she knew from work they’d done together to help young people in trouble. The police said he was out of control and armed, had threatened people’s lives at Albertus Magnus College and then the Hamden’s mayor’s office. Wasilewski called the man on her cell phone.

“I don’t want you driving around. I want you to pull over exactly where you are,” Wasilewski recalled telling him. ​“Tell me where you are. And I’ll meet you.”

The man stopped his car near Fountain Street in upper Westville. Wasilewski soon arrived. ​“Knock it off. We have to talk about this,” she said. ​“But you have to turn yourself in.” He subsequently agreed to accompany Wasilewski to Hamden, where a warrant was out for his arrest. He said he feared being beaten by the cops there, but not if Wasilewski came with him. (Read about that here.)

She called striking that balance between firmness and compassion ​“part of getting the job done. We never want anyone get hurt. I didn’t want to see him get hurt. I didn’t want to see an officer get hurt. I didn’t want him to do anything irrational that forced the situation.”

“Hello?”

Wasilewski grew up in Derby. She learned early about the importance of helping others by watching her mom, who volunteered at a Milford homeless shelter and soup kitchen.

Although she was thinking about a police career as early as 11, Wasilewski detoured to study business and psychology in college. She then drifted back to her Hardy Boys roots, obtaining a forensic science degree at University of New Haven, then winning admission to the New Haven police academy in 1994. Under the direction of Kay Codish, the academy was seeking to develop a new breed of community-focused cops who met and gained trust of citizens and caught little problems before they became big problems.

Wasilewski hit the streets in 1995. And discovered that the people part of the job to be the most rewarding.

It took work to get there.

Assigned to patrol Congress Avenue in the Hill, Wasilewski had ​“a little bit of a rude awakening. I was walking down the street one of my first days. i was saying hello to everyone. They weren’t saying hello back.

“I said, ​‘Hmmm. They’re not very friendly here. People don’t like us.’

“I started trying to have conversations with people. Some would. Some wouldn’t. I started getting the idea that police aren’t always held in the highest esteem.” 

She decided to keep working at it.

“I just kept talking to people. People would get to know me. We were there for a purpose. I used to say that all the time: ​‘This isn’t personal. This is my job. This is business.’ I was fair. If they told me not to say particular things, they knew I wouldn’t stick them out. ​‘Please don’t tell anyone I called the police.’ I wouldn’t stick them out. They got to know I’m trustworthy.”

Elsa Berrios (pictured), who became close friends with Wasilewski in the police academy, walked that early beat with her on Congress Avenue. She recalled an early stop to the home of a single mother there whose teenaged son was acting out.

“I remember Holly talking to him and saying, ​‘Hey, listen. You only have one mother. …’

“By the time she got done talking to him, the young man was in tears. We were all in tears. I said, ​‘She gets it. She knows how to deal with everyone. She understands.’”

Al Vazquez, one of Wasilewski’s assigned mentors that first year on the beat, agreed. He remembered being struck by the then-rookie’s interest in animals.

During their rounds of the Hill, Wasilewski would stop to feed stray cats and dogs, recalled Vazquez, who is currently an assistant chief. He remembered one day when they came across an injured dog.

“It was a medium-sized dog. It wasn’t a small pooch. We’re grabbing this dog. I’m saying, ​‘What are we doing? We’re trying to catch drug dealers and bad guys!’ We throw the dog int he back seat of the cruiser. We drove it down to the vet. She actually paid out of her pocket.” Later, he added, Wasilewski found the dog a home.

Of course, Wasilewski’s heart extended to people, not just animals, he said, remembering her administering CPR to try to save an elderly man’s life on Davenport Avenue during a medical call.

“No one’s better than her in terms of locking into the community and having the community behind her. She does it from the heart; it’s not fake. She’s not doing it because it’s her assignment. She does it because she wants to. She was connected to the community, and people trusted her. “

The Hold-Down

After five years, Wasilewski was promoted to detective, and sent inside to the Bureau of Identification. She got to put her Hardy Boys and UNH forensic-science training to use.

She grew restless. ​“I’ve always been an outside person,” she realized. ​“I prefer to be out on the street as opposed to in an office.”

So after a year and another promotion, she returned to patrol. But another promotion saw her returned to the B of I, where she spent five years as officer in charge.

Again, she was unhappy inside. She made up for it by landing an extra-duty gig, patrolling the violence-prone Church Street South apartment complex across from Union Station every evening.

This was the era of ​“hold-downs,” under which a private business (like Church Street South’s owner) hiring extra-duty officers could get the same officers night after night.

Wasilewski ​“loved it,” loved getting to know the families and the characters at the 301-unit complex, a mini-city of its own. She got to know 11-year-old Grace, who started ​“sticking by” the blond-haired officer on her rounds. Wasilewski got to know Grace’s single mom, too, and took the mom and Grace out for food or to events. Grace’s mom died two years later. Wasilewski has stayed in touch with Grace since, buying her school supplies, still taking her places, dispensing advice in tough times. (“It’s hard to grow up without a mother,” she noted.) In August she helped Grace move into her first apartment of her own along with her new baby.

Violence dropped at Church Street South during the hold-down years, Wasilewski said. In her decade working the 6 to 11 p.m. shift there, she said, one murder took place.

Then-Police Chief James Lewis ended hold-downs, arguing that the practice left the department open to charges of conflicts of interest or corruption. For instance,an officer reliant on a bar owner for a lucrative extra-duty hold-down gig woudl have an incentive not to enforce the law against that owner.

Wasilewski said it didn’t work that way at Church Street South. The hold-downs ended in March 2010, she said. A murder occurred there two months later. Then another in 2011. Then another in 2012. And rampant violence returned.

Cancer Couldn’t Stop Her

By that time Wasilewski was patrolling not just Church Street South, but much of the Hill — she left the B of I and in 2007 became the district manager (i.e. top cop) in the Hill North neighborhood. She spent seven and a half years there, eventually overseeing the rest of the Hill too. She knew not just the people on the street, but their families, too, as well as the look of the street. In the midst of developing crime scene on Congress Avenue, for instance, she’ll notice that a bicycle locked to a tree half a block away looks out of place, and she’ll make a note to learn to whom it belongs.

Wasilewski became known for mentoring female cops assigned to start their careers in her district, such as Manmeet Colon (now in charge of the department’s burglary and robbery division); as well as rookies in other districts, such as Cailtin Zerella, whom Wasilewski identified as a protege and began taking with her to community events.

Within the department, Wasilewski said, she didn’t encounter bias or hostility because of her gender. She earned all her colleagues’ respect as a tough, fair cop. In 2010 her colleagues rallied around her when was diagnosed with breast cancer. She underwent chemotherapy and returned to the beat within months.

One day Wasilewski noticed how some of the families whose apartments she entered had kids sleeping on bare mattresses or with a single blanket. ​“I felt sad” to see that, she recalled. So she organized a bedsheet and pillow drive for Hill families along with the city’s then-transit chief, Jim Travers.

Wasilewski considered it part of her job to organize holiday parties for kids at the substation. Another part of the job was targeting gangs, such as the feared Grape Street Crips, many of whose leaders went to jail on federal charges thanks to a task force in which Wasilewski participated.

Last year Wasilewski made a fateful decision: to seek another promotion, to captain. She made it. That meant in December, she was once again pulled out of the Hill, inside much of the day in meetings again. Once again, the fit wasn’t right.

In February she reached her 20-year mark on the job, the point at which an officer can retire. With negotiations a year away on a new police contract, and the possibility of losing some benefits, she looked around, and eventually landed a position in security at the downtown federal courthouse.

It was time to say good-bye.

“It’s a little scary,” Wasilewski said, ​“walking into the next step of my life.”

The final good-byes take place at 1 Union Ave. on Wednesday; Elsa Berrios is organizing a farewell party in the coming weeks. Holly Wasilewski will undoubtedly continue to make a difference in people’s lives for years to come, but she has completed her tour as one of New Haven’s truly finest, a community cop not just in name but in heart and in practice.

Click on or download the above sound file to listen to the full WNHH radio interview with Wasilewski.