NATIONAL COPS EVALUATION
ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE CASE STUDY:
Lowell, Massachusetts

David Thacher
Harvard University
John F. Kennedy School of Government
Program in Criminal Justice Policy and Management

Case Study Prepared for the Urban Institute

Introduction

The Lowell Police Department has undergone rapid changes over the past four years. Throughout the 1980s and into the early 1990s, the department was organized largely on the “professional model” of policing: Patrol work focused on emergency calls, management was fairly hierarchical, and relations with the outside world were formalistic. But by 1997, the LPD operated much more in the image of community policing, emphasizing community problem-solving, team-based management, and an open dialogue with the public. Pockets of the professional model still remain, just as pockets of the community policing model existed in the old LPD. But on balance the changes appear to be dramatic.1

The LPD was pushed from the outside by state and federal policy, which influenced the department through the grants it began to need when the city’s largely industrial economy faltered; it was also pushed by local government itself, which pressured all Lowell agencies to work in a more neighborhood-oriented fashion. But most important, the LPD was driven from the inside by two forces. First, and most visibly, by a talented and articulate chief with a clear vision and effective management style; and second, by many committed staff whose innovations were allowed to prosper (some of these actually emerged well before the department officially tried to “transform itself,” but they were not supported by the previous administration).

This paper will describe and explain the changes that have taken place in Lowell. Descriptively, I will try to reconstruct the LPD of the 1980s and early 1990s (section I)2 and to describe how the department operates today (section III).3 Those descriptions revolve around four major elements of the organization: Its relationship with its environment, its operations, its support services, and its management.4 In section II, I will try to explain why and how the LPD changed. That discussion will focus on the role of leadership and the COPS grants in effecting the LPD’s changes, but it will also consider other environmental influences, as well as the way in which the existing organizational structure and culture impeded or accelerated change.

I. THE LOWELL POLICE DEPARTMENT, 1980-1993

1. Relating to the Environment

Observers typically describe so-called “professional” police departments as “autonomous,” and that description does fit the LPD of the 1980s and early 1990s in many ways. The department apparently tried hard to remove itself from the more obvious forms of political and community life, minimizing its relationships with elected officials, other government agencies, community groups, the press, and even (in some ways) the general public. But elements of the LPD seem always to have maintained relationships with these groups, at times against explicit department policy. And even where formal policy is concerned, the LPD has never been able to be completely autonomous.

The Authorizing Environment

Public agencies must inevitably submit to some public controls; the question is what forms those controls will take. The Lowell Police Department of the 1980s and early 1990s apparently followed the dominant strategy of twentieth century policing, one reminiscent of the ideal political theorists call “juridical democracy.”5 In this ideal, the public does not influence police operations directly: The agency tries as much as possible to keep politicians and community groups at bay, and it does not pay particular heed to public opinion. It answers instead to clearly-stated policies that elected officials have set out in advance—like the laws the police are directed to uphold, the budget that authorizes their expenditures, or the employment regulations that govern their staffing decisions. But before considering the ways in which the public did have influence over Lowell’s police, consider first the relationships that the department downplayed.

City Government

By all accounts, the LPD did not maintain a high profile in city hall. An employee of the DA’s office during the period described the department’s reputation in city government as “aloof,” “separate,” or even “untouchable.” The department did not, for example, produce an annual report—the exemplar of government oversight. A previous city manager remembers relations with the police during this period in terms of occasional civil suits brought against the department, together with the ever-present budget issues.

To be sure, city government had some formal authority over important police issues. The council ultimately controlled budgeting, giving it great control over staffing and equipment purchases. This element of government control over the police became important in the early 1990s, as Lowell’s declining tax base forced the city to cut services. But during the relatively prosperous 1980s, a period when police staffing stayed fairly constant, these issues were not nearly so salient as they would become. In any case, city hall technically had input on other personnel matters, such as promotions. But in practice these decisions were governed by civil service rules. Even the superintendent was traditionally chosen through a competitive civil service exam, putting Lowell in the minority of cities that removed its police so dramatically from “politics.”

Community Organizations

The LPD also minimized its relationships with organized community and business groups. Like many police departments since the 1960s, Lowell did have “community relations” officers whose job it was to air community groups’ concerns and provide safety-related information and training. Jeff Davidson, the chief community relations officer in Lowell, still works for the LPD, and he is highly esteemed by many both inside and outside the department. In fact, early participants in Lowell’s community policing efforts credit Davidson with preparing the way by establishing links with many community organizations and even organizing some neighborhood watch groups on his own.

But the community relations position apparently absolved the rest of the department from such responsibilities. Community groups report that other police personnel seldom attended their meetings, and officers confirm this account; one who considered himself outside the mainstream, in that he did do something like what we now call “problem-solving,” recalled: “I was never involved with any type of neighborhood groups or working with community groups to [do problem-solving]. That was unheard of.” Isolated exceptions existed; for example, in the early 1990s the Deputy Superintendent began attending monthly meetings with the Downtown Businessman’s association. But these were decidedly exceptions.

Moreover, the community relations position itself was limited by its mandate and by its position within the department. Through Davidson the department could give information to the community—he does safety training that community groups still value highly. But it could not get information back as easily. As Chief Ed Davis explains it, a community relations officer “would never come to the chief and say, ‘Hey Chief, you know, there’s a problem over there.’ Because he’s in the chain of command and has a boss to answer to and they just don’t do that.” In the end, with the LPD’s community relations specialized in an institutionally-constrained position, community groups had little access to the department.

The Press and Public Opinion

So in the end the department did develop some formal channels for dealing with the press. But it did so reluctantly, and only after much internal strife over the “leaks” that had sprung. The practice that emerged was one in which the department maintained strong centralized controls over media communications, discouraging their overuse. There were exceptions, notably then-Lieutenant Edward Davis, who as head of Special Investigations consciously maintained close ties with the press; Cook remembers that Davis was, “clearly, more than anyone in the department, very press savvy at the time, much to the consternation of some of the people who were here.” But overall, Cook remembers his job as a frustrating one:

Cook himself believes that the department’s isolation actually exacerbated its poor image in the media.

The story is important because it echoes in many of the LPD’s relationships. True to the “professional” model, the department tried to strike an autonomous posture. But at the same time, it maintained some formal connection with these groups out of necessity. And informally, in pockets throughout the department, it often maintained fairly strong relations with outside groups. Because of their informality, there was no way to monitor them, and favoritism was always a possibility. But ultimately these pockets became important as the LPD made the transition to community policing.

The department did not emphasize other forms of public relations either—for example, the extensive youth programs the department maintains today were essentially absent during the 1980s and early 1990s. To be sure, individual officers report performing acts of charity and community service in this period. One tried to project a positive image of the police by buying Christmas gifts for children on his beat, which was located in a poor area of the city. He and other officers played sports with local youth on Sundays. But such officers remember little support or encouragement from the department: “There was no incentive. Like, you weren't being asked by the administration, you weren't being supported.” Another who coached sports teams in his private life echoed the sentiment: “If, at any point, I felt I could have started a sports program, with my background I would have done that. Because I enjoy that. . . . But it was never brought up, `geez, why don’t you try this or why don’t you try that.’” The LPD simply did not privilege community relations and public opinion.

Juridical Policing

In sum, the department did not directly negotiate relationships with city government, organized groups, and the public at large. Instead, public controls followed the model of professional policing, in which the department was governed primarily by three kinds of law: The criminal law that constrains the police response to crime, the civil law that governs police liability (citizens brought a number of civil suits against the department for brutality), and the administrative law that governs any public agency (notably Massachusetts’s strong civil service laws governing hiring and promotion).

But the core way in which the LPD responded to public demands—the “front door” to the police department—was the calls-for-service system, a rationalized and egalitarian screen for public requests.8 We will see below that emergency calls commanded great deference in the LPD.

But the entryway itself was not very welcoming. That became particularly clear in the early days of community policing when the department began to listen closely to community groups’ concerns. After addressing some basic problems like response time and on-scene behavior, problems in the calls-for-service system came to the fore: “It wasn't concerns that the police weren't getting there quick enough or that they didn't arrest somebody for stabbing somebody,” the LPD’s community liaison remembers. “It was, ‘We don't like the way we're being treated when we phone.’” Many blame the problem on personnel. At best, officers got assignments as dispatchers because they were injured; at worst, they got them as punishment for their misdeeds on the street. (For many years every dispatcher was a sworn officer, though as call volume increased the department began adding civilians as well.) One Lieutenant explains that officers “were not going into the radio room because we said, this person's going to be a good person in the radio room; it was because he's not good somewhere else.” The current head of communications describes the results:

The department tried to channel public demands through the calls-for-service system, but it seemed that the system itself was flawed.

It is hard to convey the sincerity with which officers, even today, defend the integrity and good intentions of the Lowell Police department during this period. But the LPD, like many other police departments, was committed to a dominant ideal of policing that viewed public relations dimly, as a superficial and expendable frill.

The Task Environment

Leaving the question of public control aside, police departments face a more practical need to forge external ties. Like any organization, a police department’s ability to do its job depends or potentially depends on the actions of outside groups (like city agencies and property owners). But with a few exceptions, the “professional” ideal of autonomy governed this domain as well.

A twelve-year veteran of the Department of Inspectional Services (which enforces building and sanitary codes and is now one of the LPD’s most prominent partners) maintains that in his early years, “there was no cooperation [between the two agencies]. You know, they did their thing, and we did our thing.”9 Several other agencies did interact with the LPD in some ways: Public Works, the Department of Social Services, the public schools, and the Housing Authority all apparently had some connections with the LPD. But these relationships were often informal, in that the administration did not particularly encourage, recognize, or control them; and they were not nearly as strong as they are today.

As one might expect of a police department operating in the professional mode, its most common partners came not from these agencies of local government, but from the criminal justice system and its offshoots. Lowell had the usual team of detectives that worked closely with the District Attorney’s office, and officers and detectives had the usual daily interaction with the courts and other police agencies. The department also had ties to police professional organizations like the IACP and the FBI (for example, Chief Jack Sheehan sometimes sent staff to these organizations’ training programs).

Still, conflict riddled some of these relationships. Most notably, the criminal bureau and the DA’s office were at loggerheads into the 1990s, and mending the break became a major task for Ed Davis when he took office as chief. And other criminal justice relationships were strangely absent. In the early 1980s, the LPD had little contact with federal and state law enforcement agencies, despite Lowell’s status as a major center of interstate drug trafficking. It did maintain a good working relationship with the federal Drug Enforcement Administration, but the department had very little contact with agencies like the FBI, ATF, INS, and the Massachusetts State Police—all agencies with which it works closely today. According to Davis, the department “was pretty parochial about enforcement and they looked at another agency that came in to assist, or to be involved in an investigation, as people who were intruding on their territory.” As he rose to the head of Vice and Narcotics, Davis began to change this attitude in his unit, working with every applicable federal and state law enforcement agency.

Finally, though we do not normally think of them as “partners,” it is worth noting that criminal offenders played the same role in the LPD that they do in almost every police department (even those oriented to community policing). Perhaps in part because little information flowed in from the community, the department tended to rely heavily on informants to solve many types of crime (though the LPD still relies heavily on informants today). This relationship is important to take note of because it created some minor problems in implementing community policing.

Perceptions of the LPD

Whether or not as a result of the LPD’s aspirations to autonomy, the department suffered in the forum of public opinion. Officers themselves remember that “ten, twelve years ago it was almost like we were just like an occupying army in the city . . . and there was, I think, very little support for the police department.” A management consultant who guided officers through a strategic planning process (which in part took stock of the department’s current state) reports that even those who tended to glorify the past admitted that the community viewed Lowell police “dismally.”

Outsiders confirm these judgments of public opinion of the time. Perceptions of the police were reportedly especially poor in Lowell’s minority community—particularly in its rapidly growing Southeast Asian community, as the department had no Asian officers who could speak Khmer or other important languages.10 Finally, the business community gave the department a serious no-confidence vote in the early 1990s, when an association of downtown businesses voted to hire private security to patrol Lowell’s rapidly-deteriorating commercial district.

2. Operations

The Lowell Police Department grew gradually during the 1980s, from 174 sworn officers in 1982, to 195 in 1991. But as Lowell’s economic fortunes declined, department staffing did too. By 1993, on the cusp of the LPD’s transformation,. the department had only 159 officers left. Throughout the period, the department also employed about 20-30 civilians.

Until Davis’s reforms in 1994, the organization of the Lowell Police department had remained essentially constant since 1975. Operations were spread across six separate divisions in the department. One was the radio room, which employed the department’s dispatchers, located in the computer division of the technical services bureau. The previous section described dispatch and its problems; here we turn our attention to the other five divisions—vice/narcotics, patrol, criminal investigations, traffic, and juvenile. Each of these divisions was headed up by a captain reporting directly to the deputy superintendent. (See Figure 1) Specifically, we will focus here on patrol and the three investigative divisions.

Patrol

Taking time out to do what is now called “problem-solving”—or for that matter personal business or anything else—created a reaction from one’s fellow officers.

Investigations

During much of this period the LPD delegated investigations to three separate units—juvenile, criminal investigations, vice/narcotics—, each usually headed by a captain (except for juvenile) and reporting directly to the deputy chief.

Criminal investigations was the largest of these divisions, employing about 20 detectives over three shifts for much of the period. The detectives were mostly generalists, though a few specialized in specific crimes like rape or bad checks and credit fraud. The detective bureau was primarily reactive in the sense that its priorities were set by reports that came in from patrol. The division’s commanding officer would assign priorities to the reports that came in according to how serious the crime was, and how much there was to go on. “Less serious crimes, if there was absolutely nothing to go on, then we would pretty much file it,” one detective from the period explains. For example, burglaries would often go uninvestigated, since evidence was usually slim. Specialized cases were parceled out to the other three investigative divisions: Vice/Narcotics (though its workload evolved somewhat differently, as described below), traffic (which employed officers specially-trained in serious and fatal accident investigation and reconstruction), and juvenile (a three-man unit that investigated cases in which a juvenile was a suspect or victim).

Juvenile did get some work in different ways: In the course of their jobs, the division’s detectives developed relationships with some school principals, and one reports that the principals would call them occasionally about “ongoing things . . . gang-related problems, ethnic problems [i.e., ethnic conflict],” and so on: “We would stay around for a couple of days and guide them through if it was a real hot time or something like that. We would be there after school for dismissals to try to give them some extra assistance, do some car stops after school if they were having a lot of problems with non-students.” But as this detective remembers the period, 90% of his time was spent on investigations of juvenile-related crime reports.

Investigations in all divisions were typically retrospective: The assigned detective tried to identify a perpetrator, based on interviews with witnesses and the responding officer’s report (or occasionally, though not usually, direct communication with the officer).11 Sometimes surveillance tactics were used—for example, detectives might stake out a shopping area that had reported a rash of robberies or vandalism. But none of the detectives from this era whom I spoke with reported any truly proactive investigations, in the sense that all these investigations were triggered by complaints from outsiders about specific incidents. For example, according to the captain who took over the detective bureau during Chief Davis’s tenure, even organized gangs were investigated only in response to specific crimes.

Towards the end of this period, as the city’s budget crisis grew, the detective bureau suffered. Staffing reached a low of eight detectives concentrated on one shift. Equipment suffered too; the division did have funds for equipment during the period, but it apparently did not spend much of it because it was too busy dealing with an unmanageable workload. Finally, as described in the previous section, the division’s relationship with the DA’s office deteriorated to the point where the DA sometimes refused to work with it.

Vice and Narcotics

The vice and narcotics division was consolidated out of its two constituent parts in the early 1980s, and it handled the cases its name implies (though Lowell’s thriving drug market seems to have generated most of its workload). Vice worked differently from the other investigative divisions because of the nature of its target crimes. Its workload came less from patrol officer reports than from informants and citizen complaints, both of which typically came directly to the vice division itself.12 Vice gave top priority to cases that involved dealers further up the drug distribution pyramid.

Detectives from the division remember investigations as focused on surveillance and informants. One sums up the typical memory of drug house investigations: “You know, we’d typically watch a house, get an informant, get a buy out of a drug house, and go in there and make a couple of arrests.” Areas with heavy street-level dealing, like the regionally-renowned “triangle” in Lowell’s Acre neighborhood, made easy targets, as Lieutenant Billy Taylor explains: “It would not be uncommon to go in there and conduct an operation and make twenty- five arrests in a single day. Sometimes you are only limited—and I am not being facetious about this—we were sometimes limited by the number of handcuffs we had. It was tough.” Finally, particularly when high-level dealers were concerned, investigations often became quite elaborate, as Davis began involving federal and state law enforcement agencies in major drug investigations.

Vice was clearly a well-respected and exciting place to work at the time, and in some ways it got considerable organizational support (as described below). But many that worked in the division remember frustrations as well. Ed Davis, who headed the unit for most of this period, recalls:

We had put together an excellent Narcotics Enforcement Unit. We worked with all the Federal Agencies and the State Agencies. We did high level cases. We were probably the only Police Department, outside of Boston, from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, that was frequently in Federal District Court. . . . But no matter what we did, the city still got worse every year. No matter how many drug dealers we put away, no matter how many organizations we took out, no matter how far up the chain that we went in the distribution of drugs, . . . the neighborhoods got worse and worse every year and the local narcotics were increasing. We changed tactics to try to better arrest these guys and nothing worked.

Many blamed the failure on problems in the criminal justice system—especially the courts’ perceived leniency—and this diagnosis spurred the unit on in new directions.

Indeed, those who worked under Davis in the vice unit remember their commander as an innovative man. One recalls:

He came up with this idea that he dubbed “The Welcome Wagon.” And what we used to do is put on our raid jackets, and we'd all pile into one of the vans or all the cars in the morning, 9:00, 10:00 in the morning. We'd go out, but we wouldn't have any search warrants with us. We'd go out and we'd have a list of drug houses that we were going to go to. We'd go knock on the doors of the drug dealers and invite ourselves in. And we'd talk to them. And we'd run checks on them and find out who the hell they are and let them know that this is the opportunity that they're going to get to move out of the neighborhood, or else next time we're going to come back, we're going to be back with a bag of handcuffs and a search warrant and they're going to go to jail. And some of the officers thought it was kind of—I don't know, kind of a crazy way to do police work. But, believe it or not, it worked. Not everybody moved out, but a lot of them did move out.

The Welcome Wagon also began to work with outside agencies. With the blessing and help of assistant city manager Brian Martin, Davis began bringing building code inspectors from the Department of Inspectional Services along on raids.13 The inspectors could often close down apartments that hosted drug-dealing on the grounds that they were uninhabitable (particularly since dealers would modify them extensively), and they did so more and more after some early experiments. Property managers were also brought along to determine whether or not those in the building were actually tenants. Overall, the Welcome Wagon was an early approach that bypassed the criminal justice system altogether. Its officers were not concerned with arrests but with shutting down drug houses.

One other non-traditional approach was emerging on the fringes of the organization. A young sergeant, Debbie Friedl, was assigned to the Vice squad in the late 1980s, mainly investigating sexual assault. Through a chance event, Friedl wound up getting involved with a local battered women’s agency:

It was a female victim one day that needed some services and the two male officers that were dealing with her figured, “Let's call Debbie. She's a woman, she'll know what to do” . . . I didn't know but I knew where there was a phone number to call. And one thing sort of led to another. The battered women's program . . . had had an interest in having a police officer serve on their board to get that law enforcement perspective, but they weren't really certain. They didn't have any contact or they didn't know anyone. When it was a female officer that they suddenly interacted with, it seemed like, “Oh, this makes a lot of sense. Let's approach her and see if she's interested.” And I was.

Friedl joined the agency’s board of directors, and in the process began to learn more about domestic violence and issues facing victims—an education she began to supplement by taking classes on her own initiative. At the time, the LPD was like many police agencies, in that it did not give domestic violence much attention. According to Friedl, “if it was a domestic violence incident short of a homicide, there was no investigation.” There was some discussion with then-Superintendent John Sheehan in the early 1990s about creating a domestic violence unit, and Sheehan reportedly agreed that the department needed such a unit. But staffing was extremely low at the time, and the administration decided that it simply did not have the officers to create the unit. Absent organizational support, Friedl’s growing interest in the issue had no outlet at work; she speaks of her involvement with domestic violence during this period as part of her “civilian life.” But it positioned her well for developments that were soon to come.

Coordination and the Division of Labor

These two major operational branches—investigations and patrol—worked under a fairly stark division of labor. The CO of criminal investigations describes the bureau he inherited as “very territorial,” in that it frowned upon any activity resembling investigations by the patrol force. The patrol officer’s responsibility for a problem ended with the report he took. One officer explains that “it was your responsibility to go to the call, get the person's information or whatever it was that he was complaining about, and get out. Write a report and pass it in, and hopefully somebody else would take care of it.” Indeed, the report was the lifeline between the two branches. As one Captain remembers, “The flow of information [between investigations and patrol] decreased to where it was almost nil.”

3. Organizational Support

The department’s support services partly confirm and partly qualify the description of the LPD as operating under the “professional model.” Training clearly favored professional ideals. But support services seemed to hark back to an even earlier era, in which the crucial ingredient of policing was an alert and resourceful individual officer. With a few exceptions, analyzing records, elaborate equipment, and other forms of organizational support played a fairly limited role.

Training

The Massachusetts State Police provided training for LPD officers at five locations around the state, as it did for all but a handful of the largest Massachusetts cities that had their own academies. The academy sought to instill a strong commitment to professional ideals, organized as it was in a military style that included short haircuts, clothing inspections, and strict regulations. The substance of the training was similar to most police academies, covering accident investigation, fingerprinting, defensive tactics, and the like. Even today the state academies only devotes 4-6 hours to community policing (though Lowell itself has started its own academy).

The state also mandated 40 hours of in-service training per year, which since 1983 had been offered at the Northeast Regional Police Institute in neighboring Tewksbury. But the department provided its own in-service training as well, at least to the circle of command staff close to Superintendent Sheehan. The department sent these officers to a variety of professional development courses, seminars, and the prestigious FBI training academy. One narcotics investigator recalls, “when I was in the narcotics unit for that long stretch of time as a detective, we were well taken care of in the department.” Sheehan’s substantial commitment to professional development had an important benefit for Ed Davis, whom Sheehan sent to the Police Executive Research Forum’s Strategic Management Institute for Police (SMIP) seminar—a seminar that would be Davis’s first exposure to community policing.

Information

The LPD of this period did not value the same sort of information it values today. Superintendent Sheehan distrusted crime data to the extent that the department did not submit Uniform Crime Reports for nearly a decade. Others say that the department lacked resources to devote to technology, and that the administration was not particularly interested in the new information technologies, believing that officers should get their information on the street. Crime analysis as it is known today would have been difficult, as the department lacked a computerized dispatch system, and most records were on paper; in any case the department did not do it.

As suggested in the previous section, reports were the major information resource in the LPD of this period. The department did, of course, maintain the usual information on known offenders. But all of this information was kept in paper files (the department is only now inputting most of the information into computer databases), and the system for accessing them was cumbersome. As a consequence, some think, the information that was available was underused. Arthur Ryan, the head of MIS explains that officers often “wouldn’t bother” getting background information about people they stopped “because it would require them to stick around, call into the radio room, the radio room would then make the inquiry. And then, when they got around to it, get back to them.”

At the time Ryan worked under Davis in the Vice Squad, which was a bit ahead of the game with respect to information, as it was in operations. For a time the Vice Squad was the only part of the department to use computers substantially, and one of Ryan’s duties was to oversee them. He explains that the division mostly used the computers for word processing, but it also began to use them for “a little bit of data . . . and kind of crude record-keeping.” But gradually the computers spread throughout the department—the city sponsored a computerization initiative, in partnership with Lowell-based Wang laboratories, in the late 1980s—and Ryan began to spend more and more of his time on the issue. But the department did not become fully involved in the city’s program until just before Davis became Acting Superintendent.

Equipment

Again, much of the problem stemmed from the city’s growing budget crisis. But not all of it did. Billy Taylor, who took over the detective unit under chief Davis, recalls that when he took over

Nevertheless, Taylor found that the division had unspent equipment funds from previous years.

Other Support Services

Fleming helped other officers out not only with his growing list of referrals, but also with what he describes as “peer counseling” and “critical incident debriefing.”

4. Organizational Management

Then as now, the LPD’s management consisted of a Superintendent of Police, a Deputy Superintendent, and a number of Captains, Lieutenants, and Sergeants. The Superintendent had primary control over department policies, while the Captains (reporting to the Deputy Superintendent) oversaw the department’s major subdivisions (the investigative divisions and patrol, as well as the administrative services and technical support bureaus). Lieutenants either headed smaller departmental units or oversaw a shift of patrol officers (with responsibility for day-to-day issues like juggling assignments when an officer called in sick), while sergeants typically supervised three to five patrol officers on the street. In addition, two unions—a patrol officers’ union and a superior officers’ union—had input into many important LPD decisions.

Decisionmaking and Control in the LPD

Some of the department’s management was highly centralized. Most major decisions—making policies and procedures,14 assigning staff to important positions, allocating department funding, and so on—were made by the LPD’s appointed Superintendent. The full management staff rarely met in one place, with the exception of monthly meetings that were held during one two-year period. And the organization’s hierarchy permeated even those events. One who attended recalls: “The Chief would still sit there and say, I want you to do this, I want you to do this, does anybody have anything to say to me? And everybody would say, ‘No, we need more people, we need more money.’ That was the meeting.”

The Superintendent did not make all decisions alone, however. Many in the department report the perception that there was a core of command staff and others who were friendly with chief Sheehan. This cadre seems to have had influence on important policy decisions, and many think that they also got privileged treatment in assignments. Similar perceptions surround Superintendent Davis today, as they must surround most police chiefs (and for that matter, most heads of organizations). But for a while in the 1980s the split between “ins” and “outs” became severe. One observer explains that at one point “you were either viewed [as] being in administration or you were one of the malcontents.” In any case, high-level decisionmaking was mostly centralized, whether in the hands of the Superintendent or in a more extended group that included some of his command staff.

The same pattern characterized discipline in the LPD, with an important qualification. One manager from the period remembers:

But this was only true of the internal affairs complaints that reached the chief—which turned out to be a very small fraction. Many complaints were turned away at the desk on the grounds that the officer’s supervisor had to take the complaint personally, while complainants might come in when the supervisor was off-duty. (This process reportedly became a problem on several occasions, as citizens who had been rebuffed at the front desk took their complaints to city hall or the press.) Other complaints were simply handled informally at the desk, never entering the formal internal affairs system at all. Thus although the chief did exercise centralized control over the disciplinary cases that came to his attention, the organization beneath him kept many of these cases for itself.

A similar pattern governed many operational decisions: the department’s hierarchy ostensibly controlled them, but in fact that hierarchy was something of a paper tiger. One story out of department lore, here told by chief Davis, illustrates:

If I was a Patrol Officer on the street and I made an arrest, I would call for the patrol wagon . . . and they would call back and say the wagon’s tied up right now at the booking window. . . . If the situation was very violent and there were a lot of people gathering around, I would call my Sergeant and I’d say, “Car four to Sergeant so and so.” Sergeant would say, “Go ahead.” And I’d say, “I’d like to transport the suspect by cruiser.” The Sergeant would say, “Standby car four.” Then the Sergeant would say, “Sergeant so and so to Captain at the main desk, the commanding officer.” And the Commanding Officer would say, “Go ahead”—there’d be this big voice—“Go ahead.” And the Sergeant would say, “Captain, car four is asking permission to transport a suspect from the location to the station.” And the response was inevitably these words; “Tell car four it’s okay to transport if it’s safe to do so.” So basically what was happening was the guy who actually knew what the circumstances were has made a decision to transport the prisoner. But to do it, he has to call a Sergeant who has to call a Captain who has absolutely no idea what’s going on out there in the street, who sends back a response that says, “Yes, if the guy thinks it’s a good idea, he should do that.”

So although the command staff formally had control over this decision, this control was ultimately superficial.

Given such variation, it seems clear that the sergeants’ supervisors did not exercise much control over them. And indeed, those who were sergeants at the time report that they did not have very explicit marching orders from above. One explained that street supervision meant “basically being available to the officers, responding to calls with them. Basically just making sure that everything was running okay out on the street”; and of course collecting reports.

Indeed, it would have been difficult for centralized control to influence street-level work much, because accountability was ill-defined. For example, the head of Criminal Investigations explained that before geographic organization of his unit it was hard to fix responsibility for problems—anyone with citywide command simply could not keep tabs on his entire domain:

If a particular section of the city really started to get out of control, or a couple of streets were experiencing problems that would really impact the neighborhood there, whose fault was it? Or who does the Chief hold responsible to say “Hey we have got to do something over there, this situation can not be tolerated.” Well he called me, but I cannot watch the city, it is too big.

So in the end, although the LPD centralized important policymaking decisions—like internal budgeting and general orders—in the hands of the Chief and his associates, street-level work was driven by other forces: Mostly 911, informants, and—within the limits imposed by the previous two—the impulses of the occasional patrolman, detective, or sergeant.

All of this was enforced by a definite sense of mission, which the department does appear to have had throughout this period. This mission came from the professional ideal (most officers use the term “traditional law enforcement”)—specifically, an interpretation of that ideal that placed the highest value on rapid response to calls.

The Union’s Role

The one way in which patrol officers could influence department policy (primarily around contracts and discipline) was through their union. The most important decision the union became involved in came as Lowell’s economic crisis mounted and the department had to absorb its share of budget cuts. The relevant decisions were made jointly by the chief and some from the command staff, the unions, and city hall (though after running a $13 million deficit the city lost some discretion to a state-initiated control board, which had veto power over budgeting until the city returned to the black). At the beginning of the 1990s, the department decided to freeze hiring and offer some two dozen officers early retirement—the number of sworn officers dropped from 195 to 159 from 1991 to 1993— and it saved money in other ways, like making promotions without pay raises. But in 1993 the city (apparently egged-on by press stories about the officers’ “excessive” benefits) demanded further cuts from the police: The officers would have to give up their holiday pay—some $3-$4,000 per officer—or the department would have to lay off staff to reduce the budget by the same amount (which worked out to 32 officers).

The city left little time after its ultimatum, and when it came time to make the final decision the union—whose approval was needed to suspend the holiday pay—had not voted on the issue. The city decided to suspend the officers, but Tom Meehan, the president of the patrol officer’s union, wanted time to get a vote from his body. Jerry Flynn, who was the union’s treasurer at the time, remembers that Ed Davis was instrumental to the negotiation, and the episode earned the Superintendent-to-be enormous credibility in the department:

Meehan and Davis got their extension, and the union ultimately voted to suspend the benefits. Many officers believed that to cut staffing from its already bare-bones levels would have put them in danger on the streets. Others simply felt sympathy for the large number of officers—some on the force for years—which would be laid off.

II. ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE

I have tried to suggest that some of the seeds of change already existed in the Lowell Police Department during the 1980s and early 1990s—Debbie Friedl developing contacts and expertise dealing with domestic violence, individual officers doing something like “problem-solving” before the idea was in good currency, and so on. But the immediate force for major changes in the department came from two converging strands.

1. Development of a Vision

Ed Davis had clearly been an innovative force in the LPD throughout his tenure in the vice squad. He developed a solid working partnership with federal and state law enforcement in an agency that had previously been suspicious of these outsiders. He developed a strong relationship with the press in a department that treated the media with distrust. And he encouraged many tactical innovations in fighting drugs in the city, including the “welcome wagon” and the use of building code enforcement to deal with drug houses, in a department focused on arrest and prosecution.

Davis himself does not emphasize this aspect of his work during this period: “I was a reactive cop,” he remembers. “I was out there to take names and lock people up. That's what I did. I prosecuted people, that was my mission.” But two things conspired to change his philosophy.

The first was a growing frustration with the ineffectiveness of traditional methods. This frustration had, of course, led Davis and his vice squad to a number of innovations. But Davis remembers the innovations he did try as dead-ends:

I mean, it was always—it wasn't strategy, it was tactics. It was always, they'd barricade the door, we'd get a bigger hammer to knock the door down. They started to barricade the windows because for a while we were breaking the windows and going in through the windows. So then they put plywood over the windows and screwed the plywood in so we couldn't, we'd break the windows and hit plywood. So we wouldn't be able to get in that way. So then we brought the SWAT Team in and we started to use the SWAT Team on every entry that we did. And they would bring in these hand grenades that they'd throw into the apartment and blow the place up.

By early in 1993, the frustration had boiled over, and Davis remembers one particular incident with the force of an epiphany:

Prevention was always something that—my eyes would glaze over when I heard the word . . . But after I went to SMIP, I got a new perspective on what prevention meant. Prevention, in that sense of the word, is allowing police officers to do more than just arrest people. It's a real nuts and bolts approach to crime fighting. The theory behind it is, it's more preferable to prevent a crime than it is to effectively prosecute it. In a phrase, that's what we're attempting to do here. That's what I said since day one to all my bosses and to all the police officers I come in contact with. I want them to prevent the crime. Now if preventing the crime requires locking someone up, then great, do that, that's perfect, that's exactly what I want you to do. But if preventing a crime means removing those conditions that lead to a feeling of disorder in the neighborhood, then do that too.

We will examine Davis’s emerging vision in greater detail below. Here it is enough to note that after years of innovations on the margin in the vice squad, and growing frustration with his failure to make a dent in the city’s drug problems, this self-described “reactive cop” had refocused his attention completely.

2. Development of an Opportunity

During this time, Superintendent Sheehan found himself increasingly out-of-phase with events around him. The first harbinger of this problem traveled down the road of economics.

Community Policing in State and National Policy

What Davis quickly found, however, was that the grants were not simply for more officers—they were specifically for more officers doing community policing. Thinking in particular of the Byrne grant, Davis recalls: “It was very specific. It talked about a new philosophy. It talked about problem solving. It talked about empowering officers and teams of officers.” This suited Davis personally just fine; by this time he had attended the SMIP seminar and been “converted” to the cause of community policing. But chief Sheehan thought differently, so Davis brought the grant requirements to the Superintendent’s attention. Davis recalls Sheehan’s response: “I remember one conversation he had with me at his desk. . . . he said to me, ‘I'm going to tell you something. You can write all these grants you want. There will never be community policing in this police department as long as I'm the Chief.’” But Sheehan clearly faced a dilemma: He had made a commitment to the elected officials that he would go after every funding option available, but all of those options seemed to require a style of policing that he rejected.

When the LPD received the state’s Byrne grant, the conflict of philosophies arose in a meeting between Davis, Sheehan, and city manager Richard Johnson, as the three discussed what the city would do with the $75,000 it had received. Sheehan formally accepted the need to follow the grant requirements and use the money for community policing, but it was clearly not what he wanted to be doing. Johnson remembers, “I’m not saying that Chief Sheehan fought [community policing], but he didn’t accept it readily.” And Davis recalls: “As I was leaving the meeting, he agreed to do that [follow the grant’s requirements]. But he started to talk a little bit about filling portable fifteen and portable thirteen and portable twelve,” which were the cruiser routes in Lowell. “He was stuck in the old kind of idea of, ‘Well, if we have more men, then we have to put them in the old routes.’” Concerned, Davis raised the issue with Johnson on his way out:

Throughout this period Davis felt torn: “I felt a lot of allegiance to Jack,” he explains,

Indeed, Davis found himself in the middle of a major rift in the philosophy of American policing. He was pulled in different directions—on the one hand by a man who had been a personal friend and his superior officer for over a decade, and on the other by the crystallizing ideal of community policing, which was becoming a matter of state and federal policy. In any case, this was clearly a turning point for Sheehan: His uneasiness with the grant requirements made clear just how distant he had become from the new trends in policing.

Neighborhood Power in City Government

Given the neighborhoods’ concern with crime, Johnson quickly tried to get the LPD involved. And the LPD did oblige the Manager as he went to the neighborhood meetings: “The Chief would come with me. He would bring his personnel with him that were working those neighborhoods.” Still, the collaboration was not all it might have been: “Chief Sheehan was working with it happening, wasn't overly excited about it, but at the same time, I think he recognized that it had to happen.” But as he had told Davis, it wasn’t going to happen under his leadership.

Superintendent Davis

Given a growing realization that Sheehan was not comfortable with the direction the LPD needed to move, Johnson apparently began looking for a replacement. Sheehan himself was skeptical at first: “When I talked to the Chief initially about retirement, he wasn't convinced that there was anybody that was ready to take his place that he felt solid about,” Johnson remembers.

Davis himself believes that he became a candidate during the meeting he, Sheehan, and Johnson had when the state awarded them its Byrne grant. The position was hardly in his sights at the time, but the vice squad Captain thinks his aside to Johnson (when he conveyed Sheehan’s discomfort with the grant requirements) was significant: “That was the only conversation that I had with Johnson that might give him an indication that I disagreed with the Chief. It was literally a couple of sentences, but I think he may have started to think that I might be a candidate for the job after that conversation.”

From Johnson’s perspective, Davis’s reputation had preceded him: “Davis . . . really was a leader prior becoming Acting Chief . . . . [He] recognized the importance of neighborhood police stations, community policing, reaching out to the public, the neighborhood groups, and everything that came along with that,” he explains. Patrick Cook, then a reporter for the Lowell Sun, remembers that as the city’s neighborhood initiatives took root, Davis was a strong participant, and his visibility in the city swelled:

In any case, Davis also had the good word of a number of people who had Johnson’s ear, notably Middlesex District Attorney Tom Reilly, who had worked with Davis in his capacity as head of the Vice squad.

Johnson and Cox ultimately gave in to Davis’s position, but it meant that they had to pass special legislation to give Sheehan his full retirement benefits, which he was not entitled to for several years. That done, Davis still had to take and top the civil service test (which Johnson organized under the newer “assessment center” model, which provided more flexibility than a strict written test), and he eventually did so. But in the interim, as part of the deal with Sheehan, the chief took an extended leave of absence, and Davis became Lowell’s Acting Superintendent of Police on February 11, 1994—a position he would hold for over a year before becoming Superintendent the following April 7th.

But before taking either office, Davis had one more important piece of business to perform as Captain: Opening the LPD’s first community policing precinct. That experiment was to set the course for many of the most important operational changes Davis would make when he finally became chief.

3. The Centralville Precinct

A Vision for the New Precinct

Davis did not have a specific agenda for the team to carry out, but he did have an overall vision to guide them in creating one. That vision was shaped extensively by his experience at SMIP and by extensive reading he did afterwards (much of it funneled to him by a management professor at U Mass Lowell named Linda Hart, who he had begun to work closely with when he had applied for the grant ): “I read all the management books,” Davis remembers. “For a six month period, I don't think I came out of my room. I just sucked down everything I could on teams and team based management and TQM and all that stuff that was out there.”

The vision that would guide Centralville began with a simple goal: Dealing with the problems that concerned the community. As simple as that sounds, Davis believes it represented a radical departure from the department’s previously-dominant goal—which he describes as “arrest and prosecution.” In his words:

I changed the mission. I changed it to: Our ultimate goal is responding to what the community needs. To fix a problem that they've identified. They have clearly identified a problem, they call us every day and they say the man who's living at sixteen Third Street is dealing drugs. Our response to that complaint was to arrest them. But he would literally be out on the street before we finished our paperwork. And he'd be back selling because he had to make his bail money back. So that, I recognized that what we were doing wasn't what the people wanted us to do. They didn't care if we arrested them, they just wanted us to stop the drug dealing.

Moreover, where in the past detectives had tried to focus their attention on the top of the drug distribution pyramid, Davis ordered his officers to focus first and foremost on the street-level dealers who were the immediate cause of neighborhood disruption.

With the change in goals came a change in means as well. Davis did not expect the six officers to “stop the drug dealing” alone. They would have help not only from the rest of the department, but from the rest of the city. “I told these guys that they were now in charge of that street, that the decisions that they made would be followed up on.” As he told his officers:

I want you to tow cars, I want you to call the DPW and clean up buildings. I want buildings boarded up that aren't habitable. I want you to go into the yards and take the mattresses out of the yards and the garbage out of the yards. Call the DPW right down there and do that . . . And I'm going to tell you that this small section of the city is the focus of the Police Department. So if you need the SWAT team, they'll be there. If you need the Narcotics Bureau, they'll be there. If you want a search warrant done on a place, they will direct all their attention to your operation.

Organizationally, this was possibly the most radical of Davis’s proposals, for it meant that this new, ostensibly isolated unit of the LPD would actually have a great impact on the day-to-day functioning of the rest of the department and even the rest of city government. That was a complete break with the way things had been done. “In the past, the Patrol was always the lowest rung in the police department,” Davis explains. “They were subservient to detectives. They were subservient to all the bosses. They were pretty much the lowest rung.” His job was to break down this hierarchy, to put patrol on top and make the other divisions act as support services for them. “That flipped everything upside down,” Davis maintains.

Securing the Resources

According to Davis, getting the LPD to go along with his plan was not actually very difficult, partly because of the position he himself held. As head of Vice and Narcotics, he had direct control over perhaps the most important support service the department could offer the Centralville officers. And over the years that role had given him a lot of indirect influence as well. He was the contact officer for the SWAT team, since his unit had worked so closely with them over the years. And though the criminal bureau was organizationally separate from Vice at the time, its commanding officer had been Davis’s partner many years ago. “There was probably some grumbling,” Davis recalls. “But we just did it. We sort of had a mission going on.” Of course, Superintendent Sheehan had expressed his opposition to community policing quite strongly, and he might have been expected to interfere with all this activity focused on the new precinct. But by this time Sheehan was already distancing himself from the department’s business: “There were a lot of problems going on at the time and he was not actively involved in a lot of this stuff that went on,” Davis explains. “He'd get involved in the major decisions, like assignments. He was very concerned about who worked where so he'd get involved in that. But he had walked away from a lot of the day-to-day management of the police department.”

Davis describes the process of getting outside resources as somewhat more complicated. But he already had the cooperation of one important agency, the Department of Inspectional Services, which had already begun to work with Davis’s Vice squad to close down drug houses (as described in the previous section). “We had done that prior to the Centralville experiment,” Davis explains, “so we knew that that worked. But we had never done it to the degree that we did it in Centralville.”). Here the continued cooperation of Assistant City Manager Brian Martin was crucial, as Martin was ultimately in charge of inspections.

But Centralville soon got the cooperation from other city departments as well. At the meeting with Bernie Lemoine some months ago, Johnson had given the department a mandate to do whatever was necessary to clean up the drug problem, so Davis reports feeling empowered: “I knew that I had the support of the City Manager's office, so I kind of ran with the ball.” And in the event, the Manager did deliver, as DeMoura explains:

We had the ability, through the City Manager's office at the time, to contact various agencies. And those agencies were instructed to follow-up immediately with the concerns of that precinct because that was the first one . . . . And that determined if we were to get additional grant money. So everybody in the city got together and said, “You know something, if we don't stick together and take care of these problems as they come in, we're not going to get any more money and this city won't be a safer city to live in. And it could be a potential other city that's declining really bad.”

DeMoura remembers this sense of collaboration as crucial, not just for Centralville but for the future of community policing in Lowell: “I can't downplay that position because that was the catalyst of everything that's occurred since then, that togetherness.”

One final way in which Davis paved the way for Centralville was with the press. In his years running Vice and Narcotics, Davis had developed the strongest relationship with the press of anyone in the LPD at the time, and he used that relationship on the eve of the new precinct’s opening. “I recognized that we had something here that we had to tell the people about,” Davis explains, “and the best way to do that was through the newspaper.” Davis mostly spoke about Centralville with Patrick Cook, the Lowell Sun reporter he had worked with over the years. Cook was able to run a number of articles about the new precinct, and public attention was stirred.15 Cook remembers:

When they opened, the Centralville precinct couldn't make a move without the media covering it because it was under quite the microscope. . . . They got tremendous coverage about just routine issues. They had a fire and some victims were burned out, they had the toys for tots type thing and that ran for a couple of days on the front page. They opened up a basketball school for the kids. Got that right on the front page.

Cook remembers the period as a transitional one; a lifelong resident of the city, he recalls: “Literally for the first time that I had ever seen. the tide turned toward positive publicity” about the police department.

Carrying out the Plan

With a guiding vision and the necessary resources and publicity in place, the new precinct hit the ground running. True to its vision, the precinct began by holding a community meeting, which was organized through and held in the local St. Michael’s Church, and advertised in the news media. Residents were furious about the neighborhood’s growing problems, and a huge number—most of them not associated with any organized group at the time—turned out to air their grievances. DeMoura recalls: “I'll never forget the first meeting that we had. There were approximately 500 residents there. And they were up in arms. . . . People were sick and tired of being propositioned for either drugs or sex in that area. . . . And they wanted immediate action.”

DeMoura promised that they would get it, but he also asked for their help. “I told them that it was very important that we continue the meetings on a bimonthly schedule so we could keep abreast of [the] problems out there, not problems that we perceived as problems as the police, but you perceived as a neighborhood.” It was in those meetings that the team identified particular buildings or other targets to focus on week-by-week, even day-by-day. It was not that the team itself did not quickly learn where the problem areas were on its own. “They knew,” DeMoura explains. “They knew the areas. They knew most of the drug houses from rats and informants. So it wasn't a thing that we didn't know where the serious problems were. We did.” But identifying problems jointly with the community became a matter of philosophy:

Following Davis’s model, the officers would then bring the concerns that had been raised back to their precinct and talk strategy about specific houses. “I wasn't there barking orders out as a Captain,” Davis maintains. “I was asking the people who were actually doing the job, what they needed to stop the problem from occurring.” What emerged was a toolkit of ways to deal with the problems that were identified: The officers would put a narcotics case together against a particular apartment; try to condemn the apartment with help from the Building, Fire, or Health inspectors; carry out traditional sting operations against prostitutes; or try techniques reminiscent of Davis’s old “welcome wagon” to frighten away drug dealers, as DeMoura recalls:

The dealers in particular did not always give up easily. “You know, we had some fights,” DeMoura admits. “This wasn't easy. There were some times when officers got on foot chases. We arrested tons of people on drugs and prostitution charges . . . The officers were out there full-time, doing it constantly.” Indeed, DeMoura and Davis both put great emphasis on consistency and follow through; according to DeMoura, that was precisely what differentiated Centralville from Davis’s Vice squad, which had used similar tactics: “Once they did a warrant they left. The Drug Unit left. We stayed. See, that was the difference.”

By all accounts, the results were staggering and quick. DeMoura remembers of the unit:

It cleaned up the area in a real, real short time. People were astonished with the time. It took two weeks, that you could actually walk down the streets again. . . The calls came from stabbings, fires, drugs, prostitution, to dog complaints and kids playing in the street. That's how drastic the change in calls were. It was really hard for the officers to realize, “Hey, wait a minute, Jesus Christ, we just took care of the serious problem and now you're complaining kids are playing basketball in the street.”

Residents were thrilled as well. One explains, “This was a neighborhood that was like a war zone. Now it is quiet.” Davis vividly recalls one example of gratitude, in this instance from a woman living in southern New Hampshire who, like many commuters, used Bridge Street to reach the major freeways that passed through Lowell:

In less time than anyone had expected, the new precinct emerged as a success.

When the most glaring problems with drugs and prostitution had been solved, the officers began to pay more attention to other concerns. For example, the unit would call in the Public Works Department to clean up deteriorated areas that it had cleared of drugs or prostitution: “They sent over guys with trucks to clean up the garbage, hallways, alleyways, and everything,” DeMoura recalls. “You know, abandoned houses, we cleaned up abandoned houses just to make the facade look a little better. Our sign department went over there and put up signs.” And the officers spent time simply getting to know the community, starting after-school activities with neighborhood youth and the like.

Soon the community itself took over many neighborhood improvement projects. Out of the bimonthly meetings DeMoura had called, a number of residents—spurred on by the police department’s work to clean up the area—banded together to form organized groups. One resident’s group became very active not only in neighborhood watch, but also in physically improving the neighborhood—receiving state grants to landscape some streets, working with various agencies to get lights installed, and so on. Other organizations pitched in as well, like a number of Bridge Street merchants who formed a group and began to decorate their street.

Centralville’s Impact

The fledgling precinct became a model for how the LPD would operate its future precincts, but its legacy was broader than the tools it field-tested. The ways in which it cemented ties between the police department and several other city agencies were clearly important, as DeMoura testified. The experiment had a similar effect on others, primarily by demonstrating what might be accomplished.

Perhaps most important, Centralville’s quick and dramatic success seemed to give community policing legitimacy within the department—even among many skeptics. As Davis explains, “Centralville was such an incredible success that nobody could argue with it,” echoing the sentiments of many in the department when asked about the early reception of community policing in the LPD. The Centralville officers did not take a “soft” approach to fighting crime—they attacked it with at least as much vigor, and more success, than the many more traditional officers who had preceded them.

Centralville had a similar effect on the citizenry of Lowell, though here the effect was sometimes more than anyone wanted. Johnson remembers that after Centralville, “getting a precinct” became a hot political issue in many neighborhoods:

When that station opened, it was a matter of weeks—not months or years—I'm talking about a matter of weeks, when you knew of the positive effect and response from the people and from the business community and from the neighborhood groups. So now you get more money, and you can do one more. Who's going to get it? . . . It does become a political problem. And then when you decide who's going to get it, where does it go? Everyone wants it as close to them as they possibly can.

Gone were the halcyon days when Davis had more or less free reign in siting Centralville because “nobody knew what it meant.” But for him and for others invested in community policing, there was a silver lining to this sometimes unwanted pressure: The approach had developed a constituency that would push mightily to expand it throughout the LPD. As one Lieutenant remembers, “When the city at large saw how good Centralville was working, then there was no stopping. . . . It just went through the city like wildfire.”

The final, and probably most surprising “demonstration effect” that Centralville seemed to have was on Lowell’s drug dealers. That effect became apparent when the next precinct opened in the Acre—arguably an even more troubled area than Centralville. Lieutenant Billy Taylor, who took charge of the Acre precinct when it opened in May of 1994, explains that the Acre—especially the portion around the new precinct—“was really a no-man's land. It was very tough. It was open street level dealing that happened in several different spots, really bad.” As a result Taylor was pessimistic:

I was admittedly apprehensive about the likelihood of success for this operation. . . . It seemed to work fine in Centralville, [but] I thought that Centralville was much more amenable to this type of police initiative, the community policing. I was not sure it would be a success for the Acre, quite honestly, for a variety of reasons. I thought the magnitude of the problem was much larger than it was in Centralville at that point. I thought the resistance that we would meet would be more significant. More importantly, I was not sure that the community would be responsive and back us because it was a very transient community.

Taylor tried to set his team an obtainable objective, focusing on a small park in the Triangle that had been overrun by drug dealers and junkies. “I felt as though if we could be successful in something like that,” Taylor explains, “then maybe we could branch out.” But when the precinct opened, Taylor was astonished:

Taylor attributes the dealers’ quick surrender to the earlier success of Centralville together with intense media coverage just before the Acre’s opening: “I think a big part was the media blitz and obviously the success that they had generated in Centralville—which we also used as a public relations tactic to let them know that we have done it there, we are coming over here, you are next, and this is what you can expect.” But although he and Davis spoke with the media several times before the new precinct opened, Taylor does not take credit for a conscious strategy. “I did not realize this [the effect of the media] until afterwards. . . . [But] over the course of the next year or so in trying to analyze this and talking to different people about it, I have come to that conclusion.”

Beyond Centralville

Centralville was the first official step Davis would take in transforming the Lowell Police Department. Sheehan had given him free reign over six officers, a sergeant, and a storefront substation; and the chief had not interfered with the use of other resources in the department and in the city. Davis was able to test his vision in microcosm, and it is hard to find anyone who was not taken with the results—the experiment won allies both inside and outside the LPD.

There were some, however, who thought (like Taylor before he opened the Acre) that Centralville was unique. Union President Flynn, one of the first Centralville officers and usually a strong supporter of community policing, nevertheless says:

But, Flynn continues, as the program expanded to other areas, there was a danger of moving into areas that would not support community policing as strongly as Centralville had, and which would be more difficult—simply because of their size—to police as intimately as he and his colleagues could police Centralville. Finally, there was an even greater danger, by trying to expand the program department-wide, of running into resistance or simply apathy within the LPD: Flynn and his partners “wanted to be there,” but would the rest of the Lowell Police Department?

4. Expanding, Communicating, and Building Support for the Vision

The vision Davis had developed to guide Centralville seemed to have worked in that context, but something grander was clearly needed to guide the LPD as a whole. Consequently, one of Davis’s first crucial tasks when he took over the LPD was to begin to elaborate and disseminate a coherent vision for the department. The guiding ideals and plans would change as time progressed, but for the sake of exposition, I will describe the process of developing and communicating them at the outset, only afterwards turning to the way in which the LPD carried them out.

Strategic Planning and Beyond

When Davis took over as Acting Superintendent, he immediately called a meeting with three trusted friends (only one from within the LPD) to ask for advice about how to proceed. At that stage the discussion was quite basic: As Acting Superintendent, Davis needed to decide how quickly to move, given the incomplete mandate his title implied. But as or more important than the substance of these meetings was their process. As Davis explains, “I liked the process of sitting down and kind of planning out how we were going to move forward with this.” So with some prodding from Linda Hart (his newfound-ally from U Mass Lowell’s school of management), Davis decided to institutionalize that process, starting a series of strategic planning meetings with the upper ranks of the LPD.

Davis enlisted Hart’s help to run the early meetings, believing that an outside perspective was exactly what the department needed. “Right at the beginning I recognized that Police Administrators could be very myopic,” he explains. “They only see things through the eyes of a Police Administrator. And I thought it was critical to bring in civilians, bring in people from business, bring in people from different disciplines, to talk a little bit about how things are done in different places.” Thankfully, the university was willing to donate some of Hart’s time;17 to support later sessions, the LPD wrote a small line item for organizational development into some state grant proposals.18

The sessions consisted of brainstorming among the department’s command staff (ranks of Lieutenant through Superintendent), supplemented by surveys of others in the LPD. The goal of the sessions was to define a mission for the department, and to elaborate a set of conditions that needed to be established if the LPD was to achieve that mission. Their ultimate product was a prioritized set of reforms that the department needed to undertake over the coming years in order to realize its missions.

The sessions were to be truly participatory, so that the final plan would reflect a consensus among everyone present at them (and informed by suggestions made by the rest of the department). But as Hart remembers it, creating a truly participatory atmosphere in the early meetings was difficult because of the culture of the department:

Though she has begun to get very positive feedback from participants in recent strategic planning sessions, Hart remembers the early meetings as difficult ones: “A lot of them didn't like it. You know, a lot of them really didn't like it. . . . It was very hard for them to see that anything good was really going to come out of it.” Eventually, Hart was apparently able to overcome the hierarchical style of decisionmaking that was ingrained in the LPD’s past. Davis recalls: “She knew the process; I didn't know how to do a team-based meeting. And she'd break them out into groups, I mean, I'm aware of it now, but back then, it was really foreign to me.”

There was some tension around the major decision of which direction to take the department. Lieutenant Susan Siopes, whose job it would be to coordinate the LPD’s fledgling community policing program, recalls: “You know, you got a variety of responses, all levels. Some were kind of interested. A lot were on the fence. And there were a few adamantly opposed to any kind of change whatsoever, who feel it’s just constitutionally wrong to change.” But ultimately the early sessions came to a consensus about the most important goals for the department.

Most notably, they decided that the LPD as a whole had to embrace community policing—it should not be restricted to the Centralville precinct or some larger “special unit.” The department would be completely organized along geographic lines, dividing the city of Lowell into three sectors associated with one, or sometimes two, precincts. The head of each sector would act like a police chief for his or her area, with 24-hour responsibility for the problems that arose in it. Davis’s job would have less and less to do with the day-to-day operations of the police department, and more to do with interfacing with the outside world. Most of these ideas did not originate with Davis. Hart recalls, “What was really striking to me was that it wasn't Ed, it was that group that came up with the idea that community policing needed not to be something that happened in a little pocket here and there.”

When the first sessions had ended, two members of the command staff were assigned to pull out the crucial ideas and write up the results as a strategic plan for the Lowell Police Department. The resulting document identified a number of crucial priorities, like reform of internal affairs, creation of a new domestic violence unit, and improvement of training in the LPD. But the centerpiece was clearly the structural reform of the department: The LPD was to designate an overall coordinator of its community policing program; restructure the department geographically, with mid-level management at the head of the new sectors; and create a mentoring system that stretched from the Superintendent to the Patrol Officer. The final document would serve as not only as an internal five-year plan, but also as a document in which the LPD accounted for its intentions to the outside world: The plan served as the basis for a number of grant applications, and it was ultimately delivered to city manager Richard Johnson as a statement of the LPD’s goals and objectives (see Figure 2).

Demonstrating a Commitment to Change

Before the strategic planning process had been completed, Davis faced the immediate decision described above: How quickly should he act, given his nebulous position as Acting Superintendent? Indeed, if the legislation to secure Sheehan’s retirement benefits did not go through, the Superintendent might not retire at all. Davis remembers his dilemma vividly:

It was a difficult transition time. Jack [Sheehan] was very upset with Johnson at the time. He hadn't removed anything out of his office. Even the bathroom there, he had all his shaving stuff right there in the bathroom. So I was working off the table in the office for over a year, where I didn't sit at his desk, it was his desk. . . . I didn't wear a Superintendent's badge, I didn't come in uniform, in a Superintendent's uniform. I stayed pretty much in plain clothes and there was an old Chief's badge I wore as opposed to the Superintendent. I didn't want to—I was an acting Chief, I wasn't a Superintendent. So I tried to walk very softly on that, but at the same time, I recognized that it was a critical period in the development of the Police Department.

In the end, the latter consideration outweighed the former: Davis would hold back somewhat, trying to pay Sheehan respect in the symbolic ways he described above. But especially given the momentum that Centralville had established, he and the close friends with whom he had called that first meeting determined that the time was ripe for change.

Davis began with a number of high-visibility gestures intended to show that change was in the air. “I did a bunch of things that were critical to making clear that there was a new game plan,” he explains.

I changed the colors of the cruisers. Jack was very upset about that. I didn't ask for his permission, I just did it….I cleaned the place up. The place was really nasty looking. I started walking to the main desk and throwing books out. And they were very upset at me when I did that. There were books that had been there for years that nobody ever looked at; they were just there. I felt it was important for me, every time I was someplace where there was a bunch of offices, to do something outrageous to make it clear that we were going to change things. So I took the 1986 City Directory that had been sitting around for six years and I threw it away. And somebody says to me, “That's the 1986 City Directory.” I said, “I know, and it's gone. And so are the 1942 and '43 phone books.” And I threw those away. I mean, the place was just littered with all this old stuff that nobody would throw away. . . . I also recognized that the front desk was a horror show and I changed the front desk. And that really kind of upset