Dean Esserman was flying. He was traveling to the nation’s capital to meet with the president of the United States to talk about the great work he has done as police chief in New Haven.
Meanwhile, back on the ground in New Haven, Esserman’s local career was crashing. Again.
That was the case one day in July, as Esserman was engaged in a daily struggle to maintain his local remaining support to keep his job while also doing victory laps for the nationally recognized progress the city has made under his watch since 2011.
The struggle ended Tuesday when Esserman formally accepted an apparent buy-out in exchange for retiring early, instead of completing his contract, which runs until January 2018.
Aliyya Swaby Photo
Esserman.
He had little choice. A cascade of controversies involving his temper and erratic public behavior had destroyed his credibility with cops, community members, and elected officials. He could no longer run the department effectively, could no longer mete out discipline or inspire the rank and file.
The announcement of the chief’s departure capped a dizzying summer of revelations and public outcry over episodes involving Esserman’s temper. The incidents dated back to 2014: He threatened to shut down a Yale football game that fall and call off police security for visiting First Lady Michelle Obama over perceived personal slights. This summer he found himself accused of creating a “reign of terror” for office staff and of causing a scene at Archie Moore’s restaurant over perceived disrespect from a waitress.
Esserman, who is 59 years old, had been scheduled to return to 1 Union Ave. after completing a forced three-week paid leave during which Mayor Toni Harp required him to take steps to show he could resume command of the department. He went out on leave on July 26.
Since then, Esserman faced new revelations of problems under his command combined with building public demands that he resign, including at a meeting that drew 100 people Wednesday night to Dixwell’s Stetson branch library.
Esserman with critic Abby Roth, a former alder.
Esserman didn’t end up returning to police headquarters until this Tuesday, when he came to say good-bye to his staff. He announced his resignation to about 40 on-duty cops gathered in the fourth-floor room where he previously held weekly Compstat data-sharing meetings that he opened up to members of the community.
The criticisms of Esserman are mixed with a recognition among many people, including the mayor, that crime has steadily fallen during his almost five years as the city’s chief.
Under Esserman, New Haven’s force earned national recognition for its work at improving community-police relations and working with federal and state law enforcement agencies to dismantle violent drug gangs. On July 13 Esserman flew to D.C. to participate in the four-hour meeting with President Barack Obama and chiefs and experts form around the country about how to improve American policing.
That came a week after he lost a 170 – 42 no-confidence vote from his rank and file.
Esserman tried to hang on during the ensuing waiting game for his departure. As it became clear to the rest of the police department and the community at large that his days were numbered, he dragged out the process, taking weeks to acknowledge he couldn’t return. He clung to the last shreds of community support from a politically active reverend. It wasn’t enough.
His fall contained more than a touch of irony and pathos: A sincere architect of community-policing policy that favors respect and peaceful resolution over violence and bullying had dozens of odd encounters in which he insulted and disrespected people in the community, from custodians to waitresses to subordinates to ushers and out-of-town visitors. That caught up with him. One of New Haven’s most brilliant strategic minds and political analysts failed to understand the implications of his own loss of support among politicians and organized groups or recognize the right time to leave town on a wave of success before it crashed on the shores of payback and built-up resentments. Esserman made some enemies for the right reasons, then handed them the ammunition with which to undercut him while he alienated other people who had cheered him on.
To those familiar with Esserman’s soaring flight and crash in his last job, it all sounded tragically familiar. From the previous version of his rise and fall.
Providence Parallels
That previous version of the Esserman rise and fall ended in 2011 in Providence, R.I., months before he came to New Haven. He left the Providence chief’s job under similar circumstances. You can find a detailed account in this story in the Providence Journal by reporter Amanda Milkovits.
Milkovits describes how Esserman was brought in as an outsider to clean up a corrupt department. He succeeded at that task. He won national attention (and money) to test out new ideas in community policing. He got cops on the beat. He personally visited the families of shooting victims.
But over time, his temper cost him the support of his cops. Some of the officers were initially inspired by his new ideas and his energy. Others never trusted a chief who never walked a beat as a cop, who tried a little too hard to establish his law enforcement bonafides by using TV lingo about “rolling” on cases and at times excusing or defending misbehavior. Controversial incidents added up, including a threat to throw coffee at an employee who dared to cough too often while he was giving a talk. He finally resigned under pressure, bereft of visible police or community support for a champion of community policing.
In New Haven, a mayor brought in Esserman not to root out corruption — a previous import in the job had tackled that task — but rather to re-energize community policing at a time when violence had increased in town.
Esserman succeeded at that task. He renewed walking beats in all neighborhoods. He refocused on a program pairing cops with Yale Child Study Center clinicians to help kids who witness violence. He formed a cold-case unit and forged new ties with the feds, helping initiate a celebrated gang-violence interdiction effort called Project Longevity. Crime has steadily dropped in categories across the board since Esserman assumed his post in November 2011; major crimes dropped 21 percent from 2011 through 2015. (Esserman replaced Frank Limon, who suddenly resigned as chief and fled town after losing a no-confidence vote. The city gave Limon a $90,000 package to leave.)
But as in Providence, sometimes bizarre temper eruptions made Esserman enemies and critics from the start. And not just in the police department.
“It is scary to think how he might behave in a true crisis situation,” wrote Yale Assistant Professor Daniel Weinberger witnessing how Esserman browbeat an elderly usher who wouldn’t allow him into Yale Bowl in 2014 without a ticket, threatening to shut down a football game. He stunned the Secret Service and local law enforcement alike when, failing to get an immediate answer about his place in a motorcade, he stormed away from Tweed-New Haven Airport prior to a visit by Michelle Obama and threatened to pull all his cops from the detail when she visited town, also in 2014.
Paul Bass Photo
The early days: street outreach worker Doug Bethea consults with then-Downtown top cop Rebecca Sweeney at a 2012 Compstat meeting.
As in Providence, Esserman made a point of visiting New Haven families whose loved ones had been shot. He brought them to police headquarters for press conferences after arrests of the alleged shooters. These gestures demonstrated the police department’s concern for the community; they broadcast the message that “Black Lives Matter” before a national movement emerged with the same name. The events also featured rote recitations of TV-like Esserman aphorisms like “A child of this city is a child of us all,” which reporters could recite before he even uttered them, while the chief rarely allowed any questions from reporters.
In one case, the father of a 16-month-old boy from the Dwight neighborhood thanked the cops at one of those press conferences after the arrest of the boy’s shooter. Esserman expressed his sympathy for the parents in front of the cameras. He offered the father a comforting arm as they faced the cameras. The father said later he was stunned to get reamed out by Esserman right before the press conference in a private meeting with cops over an initial report — which wasn’t borne out, and which at the time some cops had discredited — that the father had something to do with the shooting. (The father claimed he had straightened out his life after a criminal past. He was never charged in connection with the incident.)
As in Providence, many rank-and-file officers bristled at answering to a chief who never walked a beat, an Ivy League-trained former prosecutor who entered policing ranks at the top. And they felt Esserman tried to hard to compensate. Esserman opened up the weekly data-sharing “Compstat” meetings to the community, bringing the public into a previously forbidden zone of policing and building trust in the process. But many participants dubbed the sessions “Comcast,” phony show events starring the chief; or they approved of the sessions while bristling at the chief’s occasional unprovoked outbursts in which he belittled cops or community members in front of dozens of other people.
As in Providence, cops accused Esserman of knowingly hot-dogging in front of the cameras when he expressed sympathy to grieving families. And as in Providence — where unbeknownst to him a newspaper photographer had used a telephoto lens from a distance to capture a private moment — that turned out not to be true on at least one occasion.
“Sorry For What Happened”
The occasion was a visit by Esserman to the Boyd family in the Hill in March 2015.
A viral video had captured a white officer slamming a handcuffed black teen girl from the Boyd family to the pavement and injuring her after a dispute in a restaurant. The community was outraged; the cops lined up behind the officer.
Esserman had been in France when the story broke. Now back in town, he immediately went to see the family to say that, whether or not it would turn out that that the officer acted properly, he was sorry the incident happened. He said he doesn’t want to seearrests end that way.
That sounds uncontroversial, especially in retrospect given the current national discussion over race and policing. But some white cops reacted in outrage against Eesserman for allegedly “siding” with the family. A video of his conversation with the Boyds, published in the Independent (it appears at the top of this article), ignited their outrage. Cops accused him of hot-dogging for the cameras.
In fact, Esserman hadn’t known a reporter would be present in the apartment. He wasn’t pleased to arrive to find one there. He expressed his displeasure, but proceeded with the conversation, because the family had requested the presence of a reporter. The conversation ended with tears form the family, hugs, and the revelation of useful information that enabled the police to address a deeper problem. It was one of Esserman’s finest moments as chief.
That didn’t stop some white cops from storming City Hall to protest Esserman’s role and calling for his ouster (and the mayor’s) when a report came out exonerating the officer.
Esserman walked a delicate line then: He said the officer had followed his training during the takedown of the teenager. So the officer wouldn’t be disciplined. But Esserman claimed that New Haven’s academy would never have trained him to handle the takedown the way he did. (The officer trained at a different police academy.)
As with so much else that has happened with Esserman since then, he lost on all fronts: Most officers didn’t believe him about the training, and continued to defend the officer’s actions. They said they would handle such an arrest the same way in the future. And Esserman failed to convince critics in the community that he had a commitment to stopping cops from slamming handcuffed, unarmed teenage girls to the ground.
“I’m sorry for what happened,” New Haven’s chief told the Boyd family during his visit to their home. He was speaking that day for the city, for the police force, for the teenaged girl involved.
The same phrase would end up applying to the close of another chapter in his own career, in which he reached the stars and then flamed out fast. For all the drama, Dean Esserman leaves behind a safer city than the one to which he returned in 2011. Personal peccadilloes aside, that is how New Haven will remember him.
Mr. Bass, although you are surely a mensch, I disagree with this entire article. If allotted the time, I can dismember and disprove every part of it. Esserman is "gornisht helfn" and in reality gave the city "bupkes." Let's move on...(how was my Yiddish?)
Paul: Better than my Yiddish!