2. 1200 WORD Min. at least 3 scholarly sources due 1/16

Case 4: Gaining Outside Commitment in Lowell, Massachusetts

Lowell, Massachusetts, is an old manufacturing city with a population of about 100,000 located 34 miles north of Boston. In the 1990s it 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 importantly, 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).

Prior to the reforms, the department suffered in the forum of public opinion. Officers themselves remembered that “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.”

When LPD Captain Ed Davis was appointed Acting Superintendent, he initiated strategic planning and a variety of internal operational and administrative changes. In addition, he focused considerable attention on building a coalition of support in the outside world. Most simply, Davis began to open up the department’s decision making to outside eyes. He explains that he

opened the doors up for the police department for the first time, and I talked frankly about staffing issues, and I talked frankly about budget issues. I talked frankly about the internal affairs function which is always a matter of great concern to the community groups.

But Davis became increasingly uneasy with the essentially reactive stance that this type of interaction with the community implied. In particular, following the very successful implementation of a new precinct (Centralville), practically every neighborhood in Lowell demanded something similar. Davis summarizes the feeling with an aphorism: “There’s a saying in community policing, ‘You can teach the bear to dance, but you can’t necessarily tell it when to stop.’ That was what happened with these community groups.” For Davis, the problem was that the department lost any control over the agenda: the dialogue with the community focused exclusively on issues that the groups themselves raised. “We were always reactive. We were always going to a community group to answer for a particular injustice or a particular problem that was observed by that group.”

In some cases, Davis tried to win back partial control of the agenda not by disengaging from the community-initiated dialogue, but by engaging it proactively. One often-told story in this vein concerns the siting of the Highlands precinct, which became a focus of conflict between the department and a nearby neighborhood group. The problem was simple: the LPD wanted to locate the precinct in the largely Cambodian Lower Highlands neighborhood, and the local Boy’s Club had offered the department space in a location that lay at the center of many of the area’s problems. But the community group, representing the predominantly white Cupples Square neighborhood, argued that the new precinct should be located in their neighborhood. Well-connected in local politics, the group brought their concerns to a number of city councilors, and Davis began to feel pressure to change his mind about the location of the site.

Davis believed he was in the right in this case: “This was clearly just a small segment of the community,” he maintains, “and [implying] it wasn’t the Cambodian people who really needed the services. [But] That’s where people were actually dying.” Davis turned to consultant Linda Hart for advice. So she said:

Okay, well, it sounds to me like you have to put together a really good presentation that examines that data. So we’ll go out and we’ll take photos of the two locations and try to sell it to the group. And in addition to that, I think that you have to bring a different constituency to the meeting.

So she went out and actively recruited the Cambodian community to appear at this meeting.

So here you have this group of two hundred or so white lower-middle-class individuals who are pretty politically savvy. And all of a sudden, 50 or 100 Cambodian people come in and sit down at the meeting. They don’t know what to do. The people at the meeting didn’t know how to handle this. And then we walked in and we put on a really good presentation with data and photos of what the two locations looked like.

Going into the meeting, Davis had taken a hand vote to gauge support for the two sites, and he estimates that three-quarters of those voting preferred the Cupples Square location. But after the presentation—when the department presented crime statistics and other basic information about the two areas—sentiment had switched, and the group overwhelmingly voted to go with the Boy’s Club site. City Manager Richard Johnson, who attended the meeting with Davis, still remembers the event with astonishment:

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a neighborhood group where you expect to go in and get the shit kicked out of you and people throwing rocks at you—and he went in there with such a positive approach, with statistics, and facts and figures, that the people basically said, “He’s our expert. He’s the leader of this thing. We’ve got to give him the support.” And they did. And that doesn’t happen often, when people have a predetermined position. And they definitely had a predetermined position going in, no question about it.

With his growing frustration over losing control of the agenda, Davis took the proactive approach even further by sponsoring the department’s own massive community meeting, which focused on Lowell’s declining downtown. He remembers,

I had a meeting that was sponsored by the police department. The downtown business district had been decimated by businesses leaving because of the crime problem. And I invited everybody in the city that was left—I sent police officers in uniform with invitations—and I held a meeting at the Sheraton. And I brought the whole Command Staff of the Police Department there and sat them in front of all the business people in the downtown area. And I said to them, “Look, we’re going to make a difference here. If you have a problem here, you call this person. This is Captain so and so, this is Lieutenant so and so, they’re in charge of this, they’re in charge of that. We’re going to have a sheet of paper before you leave that will show you how your police department works.”

The meeting was a huge success, completely filling the ballroom at Lowell’s Sheraton hotel. As Davis sees it, the event provided a dual opportunity: “I indicated not only to the people in the city, but to the command staff, that things were going to be a little different.” Davis has maintained a strong relationship with the downtown business community ever since.

Davis attended to the outside world in many other ways. He worked closely with city government throughout this period, and also sought advice and support from Senator Paul Tsongas (whose permanent residence was in Lowell) on occasion. (For example, Tsongas helped Davis come up with a mission statement for the department, which was to create “the safest city of its size in the nation.”) Davis worked closely with many other elements of the community as well, notably the schools department and the local university. Davis went to great lengths to develop a supporting coalition not only inside the LPD, but also outside of it.

The community response to the LPD’s new openness was overwhelming. In the department’s eyes; one of the most visible indicators of this was a successful fundraising drive led by a local businessman to raise some $200,000 to buy the department’s mobile precinct. But more objective citizen surveys reveal this support as well: for example, the highest proportion of residents who thought that the LPD was providing protection “not well” or “not well at all” in three surveyed neighborhoods was only 18 percent.

Some concerns continued to exist, to be sure. Lee Winkelman, the organizing director for Coalition for a Better Acre (a nationally known community development corporation that focuses its attention on Lowell’s Acre neighborhood), believed that dispatchers lack sufficient language skills, and that precinct personnel change too often (possibly as a result of the LPD’s bid system, which lets officers switch jobs every 18 months if they so desire). But, in the end, the LPD won over even Winkelman, a committed activist who has always believed that crime ultimately stems from poverty, not inadequate policing: “It’s the best in any place I’ve worked. … I often joke around that if the other community organizers heard me saying such good things about the police, I’d lose my community organizer’s license.” He points particularly to the department’s active hiring of Cambodian and Latino officers, the very visible impact the LPD had on street drug dealing in the Acre, and the department’s openness—particularly Chief Davis’s—to community concerns.

Source: Adapted from David Thacher. n.d. “National COPS Evaluation: Organizational Change Case Study—Lowell, Massachusetts.” Online at: www.ncjrs.gov/nij/cops_casestudy/lowell4.html.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1.The text emphasizes in Chapter 7 that police executives have internal and external roles. What do you think of the approach that Chief Davis of Lowell took toward his external role? What external constituencies did he seem most concerned about? Why?

2.One of the reasons that Chief Davis worked so hard to cultivate external groups was so that they could then help him exert pressure within the police department to make changes. Why would he use a change strategy like this? This seems like it might be the opposite of the “inside-out” strategy discussed in the text in Chapter 10. In any particular situation, how would you decide whether to use an inside-out strategy or an outside-in strategy?

3.A tenet of community policing is that police departments should be responsive to community needs and priorities. Chief Davis, though, went to great lengths to get one community to change its views about where to locate a new police station. Why did he do this? Was he right to do it? Did it violate the spirit of community policing?

4.Compare Chief Davis’s management and leadership styles to those discussed in Chapters 9 and 10. Which styles and techniques did he most exemplify? In your opinion, how well did his style fit the needs of the situation in the Lowell Police Department at the time?

5.What were the strengths and weaknesses of the approach that Chief Davis used to improve the Lowell Police Department?