By George P. Hassett

For now Anthony Holloway is focused on learning.

Holloway, the city’s new top cop sworn onto the force last week, said he will be taking a crash course in Somerville 101 for the next six to eight months to catch up with the city’s criminal side.

A Clearwater, Florida transplant selected to be chief by Mayor Joseph A. Curtatone in the summer, he said he will learn about the city by walking its streets and riding along with each of the department’s 81 patrolmen by March. He has already met with Acting Chief Robert R. Bradley and much of the command staff, he said.

“I want to learn the officers core values and the community’s core values,” he said. “There will be a learning curve. It reminds me of when I became a sergeant in Clearwater and first started in community policing. At the beginning, you have to go out into the community and learn. That’s what I’ll do here.”

Holloway will become the third man to lead the city’s police force in less than three years when he takes over from Bradley on Jan. 1.

When he steps into the job in the new year he will set three milestones in the department’s history – he will be the city’s first black police chief, the first appointed by the mayor outside civil service guidelines and the first hired from outside the department.

He has a five-year contact that includes a $165,000 salary and complimentary use of a 2008 Ford Crown Victoria. He will also receive $13,379 from the city for relocation and travel expenses.

In interviews with The Somerville News, Holloway’s two predecessors said the new chief will have to adjust to a stronger patrolmen’s union and a unique style of politics found only in Massachusetts.

“First thing I would say to him is good luck in this endeavor,” said George F. McLean, chief from September 2001 to March 2005. “He is going to have to deal with some outside constraints he didn’t see [in Florida]. Politics is a big one. As an appointed chief he won’t have the independence from the mayor I had with civil service. [Being appointed by the mayor] limits what a chief can do. The police chief has to be able to make decisions independent of politics.”

However, McLean said, Holloway should be able to adjust to the crime fighting aspects of the job quickly. “Different communities may have different issues but the job itself is pretty standard,” he said.

Bradley, who submitted his resignation last week and will leave the department after 38 years on Jan. 14, said he will advise Holloway in the coming weeks to seek out advice from longtime officers in the department.

“I’ll tell him he should spend the time getting to know people here and understand the personalities in the department,” he said last week.

Bradley also said Holloway should get used “to doing more with less because Somerville is not a city that has a lot of money.”

Holloway joined the Clearwater police in 1986 and rose through the ranks to become a captain supervising media relations, budgets, major investigations and the day-to-day patrols of over 100 officers.

In a July question and answer session at City Hall where he appeared with the other two candidates for the job ‚Äì Bradley and Miami-Dade Major Ruben Galindo — Holloway stressed community policing.

At the forum he told a story of being a newlywed cop called in to quell “a mini-riot” in a Clearwater neighborhood. With only two days of marriage behind him, he said he lost his wedding band in the upheaval. He spread the word around the neighborhood that he wanted his ring back and within 24 hours it was back on his finger.

“Ever since then I’ve considered myself married to my wife and the community I work in,” he said.
Beginning next week that community will be Somerville.

Holloway said his goal is to push crime out of Somerville and into surrounding cities and towns. To do that, he said, the department will nurture relations with citizens who may be able to help police investigate unlawful activity in their neighborhoods.

One community Holloway said he will reach out to is undocumented immigrants. He said he would continue the city’s current policy of not asking victims and witnesses of crimes about their documentation status. A good relationship between police and law abiding undocumented immigrants is essential, he said.

“If that community does not come forward and inform us of crimes that are happening, they are building an underground network just for the criminals and making organized crime stronger,” he said. “In Clearwater we had a large Hispanic community from Hidalgo, Mexico and we were able to target the ones running the brothels and selling drugs.”

Federal immigration agents swooped into Somerville in August as part of an operation targeting the violent Central American gang MS-13. Holloway said if federal authorities were to come to him and ask for his help in an immigration raid he “would be more than happy to assist them.”

When Holloway was selected for the job by Curtatone, multiple sources inside the Somerville Police Department said the job was first offered not to Holloway, but to Galindo and that Galindo had turned it down after deciding Curtatone would not allow him to run the department independently. Curtatone called that story “grossly exaggerated.”

When Curtatone campaigned to have the job taken out of civil service in 2005, Patrolmen’s Union President Jack Leuchter said the move would lead to a police department controlled by the mayor. Holloway promised that would not happen while he’s in charge.

“The mayor is my boss but I didn’t come here to be a yes man,” he said.