A grateful city bids farewell to Paul Upton as he steps out of his role as Deputy Chief of Police of Somerville. ~Photo by Douglas Yu

By Douglas Yu

Paul Upton, Deputy Chief of the Somerville Police Department, stepped down on Monday. After serving the city for approximately 30 years, the native Somerville resident, born to Irish immigrants family, said his job was not going to stop from there.

“I love the city. I spend most of my life here,” Upton said. “I always wanted to get involved in community safety service. By being a police officer it lays the foundation for me to move to the next chapter.”

Upton said that being a police officer was more of a vocation than a career, and “it was almost like a calling,” as he recalled when he took the job when he was 34 years old.

“If you want to be a police officer, and you know that’s what you want to do, I looked up a lot of police officers from Cambridge, Somerville and other places,” Upton said. “They were my mentors even before I came on this job.”

“I want to help people” is the answer when Upton was asked why he wanted to be a police officer. And when asked the reason why Upton wanted to help, he said that his parents had a strong influence on him.

“A big part of my parents’ life is helping people from Ireland, helping charities and helping religious organizations. My mom was a fund raiser for helping old people,” Upton said. “It makes me who I am today.”

Upton said that his father was a strong influence on him too, since his father had been a police officer in MIT back in the days.

Growing up around Davis Square, Upton witnesses its transition from a “ghost town” to a vibrant part of the city. In the late 1960s, a big supermarket with a parking lot was built at Porter Square. Not long after that, many businesses that were supposed to be introduced to Davis Square were drawn to Porter Square. It caused the shutdown of many stores in Davis Square. Upton said that until the late 1970s, many local politicians proposed to extend the red line and build a Davis Square stop. “That’s the beginning of the change of Davis Square,” Upton said.

Upton has a lot of good memories about his career path. The highlight is probably that he attended the FBI National Academy in Virginia.

“That’s a premier command management school. The Academy invites police officers around the country to study police leadership and management, command and organization every year.” Upton said. “It was a fantastic opportunity.”

Mayor Curtatone presented Deputy Chief Upton with a special commendation at last week’s Board of Alderman meeting.

Upton applied to the FBI National Academy when he was a patron. He was admitted in 1994 and was required to do a series of physical tests. Upton thought that he became a better police officer after the three-month training in the Academy.

It is very common to see tragedies as a police officer, but Upton thought that something good always came out of them that media would ignore most of the time.

In the May of 1997, a newly born baby was wrapped up in a trash bag and thrown out of a third-floor window in Somerville. Three years later, the mother of the baby was found guilty of the crime. The medical examiner’s office at that time still possessed the dead baby’s body and nobody was going to bury it. However, after telling the sad story to the public, the Holy Cross Cemetery in Malden and several funeral directors offered free burial service. Boston Herald columnist, Peter Gelzinis then wrote an article about the tragedy later on and more organizations responded by helping out with the burial service, including a monument company in Everett that donated a gravestone for the baby.

“That’s a tragedy, but I saw something really beautiful,” Upton recalled. “Everybody wanted to do something after they heard the story. I saw the entire community come together to help.”

Upton acknowledged that his job also influenced his 15-year-old son, who is now a Malden Catholic High School student. After MIT police officer Sean Collier was shot and killed by the Boston Marathon bombers, Upton found out that Collier had been supporting Jimmy Fund for a very long time. On Upton’s birthday this year, he decided to join the Jimmy Fund walk and raise money in Sean’s name.

“When my son found out, he wanted to do it too,” Upton said. “So both of us raised $2,000 to donate to the Jimmy Fund. I’m very proud of him.”

Upton was promoted from Captain to Deputy Chief in 2008. He said it was an honor to serve Somerville and his bosses were always the people.

“I’ll be in my office until the end of the day on Monday,” Upton said. “And I want to leverage the training and the skills I developed here to help other people. I won’t stop working.”