By Mayor Joseph A. Curtatone

(The opinions and views expressed in the commentaries of The Somerville News belong solely to the authors of those commentaries and do not reflect the views or opinions of The Somerville News, its staff or publishers.)

Amidst all the attention (rightfully) being paid to the selection of DEA Police Regional Director Thomas Pasquarello as the City’s new Police Chief, I wanted to take a moment to talk about the Police Department itself.

Somerville’s crime statistics have been moving in the right direction for a number of years, in no small part because the city implemented many of the recommendations made in 2005 by the Somerville Police Advisory Group (SPAG). The Police Department has provided firearm and first responder training, supplied officers with modern equipment, and removed the Chief from the civil service rolls in order to improve executive accountability. By following those recommendations, we have a safer city and a better organized and prepared force. Yet the department still must implement the rest of the SPAG recommendations.

It is no surprise that many of those recommendations remain on the to-do list. Organizational change is never a rapid process. Yet we did not put together the SPAG report in order for it to collect dust. No matter who we selected as the new chief, that person was going to be tasked with implementing the rest of these recommendations.

One of the leading suggestions from SPAG that remains a work in progress is improved community policing. The Department recently instituted a walking beat in Davis Square, but we need walking beats all over this city and officers regularly out in the community. We want residents to get to know all our police officers.

Community policing cannot be something practiced by a few officers, it must be embraced by the entire police force, top to bottom and everywhere in between. Most of the people in Somerville are never going to break a law, but our officers need to get to know those people, hear their concerns and enlist them in keeping an eye on their neighborhoods. Our goal is to solve issues before they become crimes, spurring positive change in the community at the street level. SPAG also recommended that the Police Department initiate more community outreach meetings and projects.

In recent years, the Department has done a better job of compiling statistics. It must embrace fully the SPAG report’s recommendation that data-driven priorities and strategies be a regular focus of the entire command structure, or that this work also filter down to patrol officers. On top of that, the Department also needs to identify quality of life indicators beyond crime statistics to help assess how effective Somerville Police have been in fostering safer, happier communities. This could be anything from the number of new storefronts in a given section of the city to the number of holiday decorations put up in a certain neighborhood.

Organizationally, the Department still needs to establish more accountability for superior officers and improve geographic responsibility. Each sector command needs to establish specific goals, be organized to achieve those goals, and be given the necessary tools. Right now we do some of this, but we are not yet as organized as we need to be. This remains a work in progress.

None of this is news. These recommendations were made nearly five years ago. Part of our responsibility as public servants is to act on things like the SPAG report, which was designed to make the Somerville Police a more stable, safer, better organized force. What we do not want to do is follow the poor example of the federal government, which ignored many of the critical recommendations of the 9/11 Commission.

While we have this week answered the question of who the new Chief will be, I believe it is important to remind Somerville residents that much of what the new Chief needs to accomplish has been laid out in the SPAG report. Our priorities have already been well-defined and no one should be taken by surprised as we pursue them in the coming months.