New Police Commissioner Takes Charge

Daily chatter inside the Cambridge Police Department over the past 12 months has centered around a lot more than the latest auto theft or sexual assault.

A number of problems have plagued the department throughout the year, including frequent changes in leadership, a tension-filled police force and an incessant demand for more community involvement.

The department took its first step towards curing these maladies on May 15, when former Miami Police Chief Perry L. Anderson spent his first day as Cambridge's first-ever police commissioner. But the battle is only half over.

Anderson, 46, is faced with the immediate task of providing stable leadership, which the department has lacked since late last year when a heart attack forced former Chief Anthony G. Paolillo to relinquish his duties to an interim head. The shuffle of chiefs continued into the winter and spring when the role of temporary top cop changed hands a few times, as the highest ranking officers reached retirement age soon after becoming chief.

According to City Councillor Edward N. Cyr, this rapid turnover over the past six months has compounded the inner-departmental friction which plagues Cambridge police.

"Right now there are a number of conflicts from within the department, starting with the generation gap," Cyr said in February. "The department has been run by one older group for a number of years. And the women aren't happy either--not one woman is a superior officer...Add to that the Black officers and the non-Cambridge natives, and you have a disjointed group of officers who don't trust each other," Cyr said.

But perhaps the department's most pressing concern, and one which city councillors say played the dominant role in forcing the hiring of the city's first police commissioner, has been the department's sparse, inadequate relations with the community. In the middle of the commissioner search earlier this year, some councillors pointed specifically to the police department's broken-down relations with Blacks, Hispanics and youth.

Many city councillors argued that the system of selecting police chiefs from within the department based on civil service exams failed to provide the department with strong, experienced administrators who could adequately serve the community. But they said an outside leader taking the role of commissioner would be in a better position to respond to the needs of city residents.

The Selection Process

The City Council created the post in 1977 in response to similar pressures, but funding had not been allocated for the position until last spring. City Manager Robert W. Healy conducted the selection process, which he began by whittling a preliminary list of 247 applicants down to nine semi-finalists in January with the aid of a 10-member professional advisory panel.

The panel, which included the Kennedy School's Guggenheim Professor of Criminal Justice Mark H. Moore, joined with a 13-member citizen advisory panel in February to scrutinize the all-male group of remaining candidates in a series of interviews. Healy referred to the panels' recommendations before narrowing the field to five finalists in early March.

On March 18, Healy appointed Anderson Cambridge's first police commissioner, ending what he called a "comprehensive, exhausting and rewarding" process.

Most people involved with the decision said they were pleased with the outcome, including Rev. L. Nelson Foxx, who served on the citizen advisory panel.

"Anderson is a very well-seasoned policeman who speaks with a lot of wisdom... He wants to place emphasis on interacting with the community-- he's big on that," Foxx said.

Anderson, a 21-year veteran of the Miami Police Department who served as chief since 1988, left his post as chief on April 30 to prepare for his new job which began on May 15.

He said he already has a jump start on combatting the department's most severe aches and pains--community relations and unity among the officers.

"I've started to work on changing the organizational structure here to make some responsibilities more compatible with assignments." Anderson said. "This will allow our department to be more responsive to and more compatible with our community."

The commissioner, who has also begun talking to officers for suggestions on how he can improve camaraderie within the department, said he plans to increase the number of people working on community relations, place more officers in the school system and create a "permanent public information office to serve the media better."

Anderson said he will create a citizens advisory panel this summer "to assist me and the department by bringing civilian perspectives to our attention." He said he is looking for a diverse 13-member panel of all professions to start in late June or early July, with some Harvard students and faculty joining the group in the fall.

"[Harvard] University should be more familiar with the operations of our department and vice versa," Anderson said.

As Anderson's first month on his new job winds down, there is no reason to doubt that he can successfully reform Cambridge's police operations. But even he knows that only time will prove that he can make the necessary changes.

"Right now I'm just going to streamline and reorganize the department and struggle with it," he said