News Roundup

Colonel Dean Esserman: Your Friendly Neighborhood Police Chief

Business Innovation Factory

Riveted. That’s what attendees were when Colonel Dean Esserman took the stage at the inaugural BIF-1 Collaborative Innovation Summit in 2005. Esserman had just taken over as the new police chief of Providence. Unexpectedly charismatic, audience participants witnessed a sober-faced man of intense dedication and passion for public service who did not mince words. It was clear that this one-time lawyer, who thought he was going to be a doctor, had big changes in store for the citizens of Providence.

Indeed, two years later, much has changed for the now 50-year-old Colonel — including a bout with colon cancer which he successfully battled in 2006. Providence has changed, too.

What was once a dysfunctional, centralized department riddled with everything from favoritism to corruption, is now a highly regarded professional law enforcement agency. In the past four years, Providence’s murder rate has been cut in half.

City chiefs from around the country frequently ask to sit in on his now trademark weekly “Comstat” status sessions. In addition to providing detailed analysis of crimes and their patterns, Esserman regularly invites some very unlikely guests to the table including federal, state and local law enforcement officials, parole officers, school officials, social workers and even citizen rights advocates. This inclusive effort is routinely credited with helping to save lives in Providence.

Far from traditional, “collaboration has become the bedrock of what we’re about now,” Esserman says.

Esserman takes seriously the idea that the police can prevent crimes from occurring. The core of his policing strategy — known as community policing — is an innovative approach that revolutionized law enforcement in the 1970s when city chiefs around the country were grappling with skyrocketing crime rates. “Back then, it was the policing profession — along with scholars and writers and newspaper editors and police chiefs — looking at us and asking what we were doing wrong,” says Esserman. “This big debate helped us realize that anonymous, distant, 911-driven policing wasn’t working. It had created great distance between us and the community.”

When he came to Providence, Esserman decentralized the police department and opened nine neighborhood substations throughout the city. He retells a conversation he had with one Providence citizen: “This gentleman said, ‘You know, chief, I don’t particularly like your department and I don’t know if I even like you yet, but I love that cop you put in my neighborhood and don’t you ever take that cop out of my neighborhood. He’s become part of our community.’”

By having the same officers in the same community, every day, accountability measures are also now in place. Every week, the commander of each neighborhood is grilled on local crime statistics and held responsible for crime in his area. That accountability travels the ranks of the entire police force. “I tell my people it’s not a fair world,” he says. “You produce bad results, you got problems with me. You produce good results but alienate the community, you got a problem with the community. You’ve got to answer to both.”

The degree of community integration Esserman has established is not especially common in American policing. He actively recruits the insight of innovative scholars, business leaders and social visionaries to create the great policing debate he participated in the 1970s and 1980s. Following his appearance at the BIF-1 summit, Esserman was appointed a board member of the Business Innovation Factory. “It doesn’t matter if you’re a police chief or CEO. Much of innovation is about organizational culture, how you become sensitive to trends, how you respond to them, how you change,” he says. “I see BIF as a catalyst for debate and as a platform for driving real change.”

Day by day, Esserman is actively turning the streets of the city into a laboratory for new crime-reduction strategies. “I have three children of my own, and I also have another 28,000 children. The children of this city are my children. I go to every shooting in this city. I go to every emergency room. I go to every funeral. We’re not going to continue to accept the fact that violence is okay,” he says. “Instead, the Providence police force will be front and center in our community’s effort to create public order and safety.”