Dean Esserman

Chief of Police, City of Providence, R.I.

When new Providence Mayor David Cicilline took office in January 2003, he knew he had his hands full. The police department had been accused of favoritism and corruption and crime was on the rise. In just 20 months, the department had gone through three chiefs.

Arriving in the mayor’s office, Cicilline knew one of his first orders of business was to turn the police force around. He turned to Dean Esserman.

An expert in community policing, Esserman’s innovative approaches had revolutionized law enforcement since the late 1970’s. A protégé of William J. Bratton and Lee P. Brown, both former New York City chiefs who have turned around police departments across the country – Esserman had applied the community-policing model as Assistant Chief in New Haven, Conn. and as Chief in Stamford, Conn.

Now Cicilline wanted to try it in Providence to reduce crime and win back citizens’ trust.

A Collaborative Police Force Reduces Crime and Strengthens a City

“We’ve decentralized the department for the first time in its history,” Esserman says. “We opened neighborhood substations throughout the city, developed relationships and broke down the anonymity that is born from the traditional ‘911-call-in’ concept of policing. By having the same officers in the same community, every day, we develop accountability.”

Every week, the commander of each neighborhood is grilled on local crime statistics and held responsible for crime in his area.

“We hold the commanders’ feet to the fire,” Esserman says. “We don’t write annual reports, we don’t look back every year – we look at how we did every week and how that compares to the week before.”

The results are encouraging: crime in Providence has fallen by about 10 percent a year for each of the past two years, and the force’s image is changing.

“We’re getting great feedback because for the first time in a generation, the walking beat officer is back on the streets of Providence and citizens know officers’ names without having to read their badge numbers,” Esserman says.

Esserman is breaking barriers in other ways as well: The department’s crime data now is outsourced for statistical analysis to the Providence Plan, a private, nonprofit group; the department is partnering with state and federal officials on all of its gun arrests; and police officers take social workers from Family Services of Rhode Island in their patrol cars so they can intervene, for example, with children who have been exposed to violence.

“It hasn’t been our tradition, but collaboration has become the bedrock of what we’re about now,” Esserman says.

Esserman is requiring his entire command staff to attend the Business Innovation Factory summit, he says, because the insight of innovative thinkers, business leaders and social visionaries is applicable to the Providence police force as well.

“Much of this is really conversations about organizational culture, how you become sensitive to trends, how you respond to them, how you change,” he says. “In many ways, these last two years in the police department have been a re-engineering enterprise like in any other business. In essence I run a large company – except that I measure my profits and losses in crime.”