That April day in 2005, the officers who’d marched for miles wiped the sweat trailing down their faces. One collapsed in the cemetery and had to be helped to his feet.
The priest blessed the casket of the murdered Providence detective. A cruiser’s siren wailed and then faded, symbolizing Jimmy Allen’s last call.
After the thousands of mourners and marchers dispersed, Chief Dean M. Esserman stayed behind.
The night Allen was fatally shot by a suspect inside the Providence police station, Esserman sat beside his body at Rhode Island Hospital and rubbed his shoulders as officers came in to pay their respects.
Now, in the cemetery, he sat alone, until the funeral directors came over to the casket. He helped wheel the casket into the chapel and then followed as it was driven to the gravesite.
In his dress blues, the chief stood with the gravediggers as they poured dirt into the grave.
The gravediggers raked the fresh loam. Esserman stood at the foot of Allen’s grave, raised his gloved hand, and saluted. A Journal photographer, who happened upon the scene from a great distance away, captured the shot.
Printed on the front page the next day, the photo inflamed Esserman’s critics, especially inside the Providence Police Department. He must have known his picture was being taken, they said, and was cynically using an officer’s death to improve his image.
Poser, they sneered.
When Esserman arrived in January 2003, the city’s new mayor, David N. Cicilline, gave him a title that was both promise and curse: Best police chief in the country.
For most of the previous decade, Esserman’s predecessor had been a man built like a bulldog, gruff and defensive, snarling obscenities when riled up. Urbano Prignano Jr. — known to all as “Barney” — smoked in his office at the old police station at LaSalle Square, toy police cruisers on his desk, pictures of the Red Sox on the wall, and the TV on in the background.
Prignano led a department where relatives followed each other onto the job — a place where friendships were built over decades, and scars earned on the street brought more respect than the bars on your shirt.
On his office wall was a framed photo of then-Mayor Vincent A. Cianci Jr., who’d plucked him from a sergeant’s job and promoted him to inspector, then major and finally chief. In the corruption trial that sent Cianci to federal prison, Prignano testified under immunity that he’d helped officers cheat on the promotions tests. “Sometimes your heart controls your mind,” he said.
Outside the department, cops were labeled “Buddy’s Boys.” Residents bristled at police officers in community meetings, screamed accusations of racism and brutality.
Esserman was the anti-Prignano — Upper East Side-New York, thin and balding, with an unsmiling stare that he sometimes directed at people and made them uncomfortable.
He was a Dartmouth man, a former New York prosecutor who had served as police chief in Stamford, Conn., and the Metro-North Railroad, and was assistant chief in New Haven. But he had never been a street cop, and he was only the second outsider ever to become chief in Providence. His critics would ultimately deride him as “Chief Shiny Badge.”
He adopted the cop lingo –– “Did ATF roll on that case?” he’d say about gun arrests –– but his clipped Ivy League manner clashed with the police-officer cadence.
He held himself apart. After work, when other officers headed to the bars to unwind, he went home. Sometimes one of his three children or his wife would call him in the early evening, reminding him about dinner. When the children were younger, he would mention to visitors the books they were reading together.
He was an outsider, and knew it, and that was what was intended. Cicilline’s idea was that the Police Department needed someone to lead it out of the dark days, to help the many decent cops overshadowed by the allegations of corruption to turn around their department.
And in the beginning, Esserman wasn’t alone. Officers at every level jumped at the chance to try a different way.
The new way involved keeping City Hall out of the Police Department and reaching out to the community — building partnerships with other agencies and working closely with city residents.
The vision was Dean’s Way, as some called it. Eventually, his subordinates realized that the discussions often were less about deciding what to do — even though he would phrase it that way — and more about how best to implement his ideas for improving the department.
Not that the chief didn’t want to hear good ideas. Officers who were willing to try something different, or who needed equipment, found support and encouragement. He would get excited and brainstorm with them. “What do you need?” he would ask.
He singled out for praise officers who were working hard to improve the department, even as he blistered those he didn’t think were trying hard enough.
His own ideas forced some to stretch — sometimes into areas they didn’t think were the responsibility of the Police Department. I’m not a social worker, some would complain. I’m a cop.
But as awkward or arrogant as he could be with the department’s officers, Esserman was in his element dealing with those outside it who needed the human touch.
The day after Sterling “Mousie” Washington’s son was murdered in 2007, Washington collapsed in a chair at the Davey Lopes Recreation Center in South Providence. He hadn’t slept since getting the news.
He dropped his head on a table and cried.
Then he felt a hand on his shoulder. He looked up and saw the face of the police chief.
Mousie, I’m so sorry, Esserman said. Please let me know if there’s anything I can do.
Years later, Washington still thinks about that moment.
He’d already buried one son, nine years earlier, when the boy was shot by a man aiming for someone else. No one in the Police Department came to see him then.
That killer had struck a deal by giving information on a higher-profile murder, then he was back on the streets. Washington blamed the justice system, and the police, for letting the man back out. His younger son never got over it.
Now, the boy was dead, stabbed to death outside a nightclub. And here was the chief — a man Washington had met only in passing when Esserman would stop by the recreation center, part of the chief’s perpetual rounds of the neighborhoods — telling him he was sorry.
This was something that Esserman had been doing since he’d become chief four years earlier, away from the media, out of sight of most of the cops. He demanded to be notified about every shooting. He visited the families of victims.
In public, he talked about the devastation felt by the mothers and fathers, a city losing its youths. To cops who’d seen a lot, he sometimes sounded foolish. Esserman hadn’t been a street cop, and he didn’t have the calluses that develop out of self-protection, from witnessing one horror after another.
All Washington knew was that the police chief was looking into his eyes, another father seeing his sorrow.
It was the moment that won him over. His dislike for the Providence police went away.
He saw the chief as a human being. And he started seeing the officers the same way.
Esserman was the idea man, too, the rainmaker, who went to D.C. and spoke to congressmen, who found connections that brought millions back to the city. He told the story about Providence’s work in criminal justice seminars in New York City and before congressional committees.
Each time, he told an enviable story to outsiders, about a police department that pulled itself out of its troubled past and began connecting with the community. He talked about drug-riddled neighborhoods where cops and residents now worked together to eradicate street-level drug dealing. He talked about the children lost to gunfire, what violence did to families and children, and how Providence was trying to end the cycle.
In this world, he was a winner.
One day last year, as talk radio shouted that he should resign after several officers were caught in a state police drug sting, the chief walked into Family Service of Rhode Island and was greeted with smiles and praise.
Here, he was a guest of the agency, which was kicking off an effort to establish a national children’s anti-poverty program. The Providence Police would be a major part of the program, part of Esserman’s passion for helping children, especially those who had witnessed violence.
The chief blended in with the crowd of clinicians and policy wonks, who shook his hand and praised him.
But inside the department, his support was eroding.
In the beginning, many Providence police officers were eager to move forward, to get the department they’d devoted their careers to away from its troubled past.
But as the years went by, Esserman still kept bringing up the past corruption. He would rip into officers publicly, for real or perceived misdeeds. And he was the taskmaster who never let up. He had ideas and wanted to see them through.
Some high-ranking officers complained of burnout. There were endless meetings, phone calls, demands.
At weekly meetings of his command staff — where lieutenants from the districts and representatives of outside agencies shared information, with Esserman, his top deputies and one another — he handed out copies of articles clipped from newspapers and journals about new ideas in policing. He was always reading, intrigued by ideas being debated about criminal justice at universities and think-tanks.
Let’s do this, he’d say, while some of his commanders wondered how they were going to make the latest idea happen.
Some officers were inspired and came up with their own ideas. Others said behind his back: Enough. Smoke and mirrors, they said of his ideas. One bragged that he wasn’t making any arrests as long as Esserman was chief.
Esserman hadn’t been expected to stay long, just long enough to get the department to embrace community policing and uproot the causes of the testing scandal. Even his critics said he had enough connections in the national law enforcement community to keep moving on.
But when he and his wife, Gilda Hernandez, came to Providence, his two younger children were just 5 and 10 years old. They enrolled in schools. And eight years later, Providence was home.
Still, he knew he would always be an outsider in the Providence Police Department.
In a rare unguarded moment one day last year, he said that his younger son, Sammy — who had played with his badge on the day Esserman was sworn in — would have a better chance of being accepted within the Providence Police because Sammy would start as a rookie officer.
By this January things had begun to unravel.
During last year’s election campaign, three of the five mayoral candidates said they would fire him, and the other two — including the eventual winner, Angel Taveras — were noncommittal.
Once in office, Taveras decided to fill the long-vacant public safety commissioner’s post. He chose a man who had once been Esserman’s equal — retired State Police Col. Steven Pare.
Esserman no longer had free rein. When Pare suspended Esserman for a day for threatening to throw coffee into the face of a sergeant who repeatedly coughed while Esserman was giving a speech, other officers were giddy. For years, they’d endured the chief’s sudden temper. Now, finally, someone was holding him accountable.
Pare took back the old commissioner’s office, which Esserman had occupied for all the years Cicilline served as his own commissioner. The chief’s books were removed from the bookshelves, his photos taken off the walls. Esserman moved into a smaller office on the other side of the building. The fiscal staff and assistants remained behind.
Reporters’ questions to Esserman were now redirected to Pare and, sometimes, the mayor’s office. Reporters were no longer allowed to attend the weekly staff meetings.
Over the years, Esserman had always had a veteran cop as his right-hand man and confidant. First it was Andy Rosenzweig, a retired New York City detective, who recommended Esserman for the job and then became his deputy chief. Then Paul Kennedy, who’d risen through the ranks, succeeding Rosenzweig. Kennedy was the buffer between the chief and the rest of the officers, handling the day-to-day running of the department.
And then in February, Kennedy retired. Maj. Hugh Clements, another career Providence policeman, respected by officers, was chosen to take his place. But after his appointment, Clements went out on medical leave until late June.
Esserman still walked in the neighborhoods, dropped by the recreation centers, stopped in at local functions. But his isolation was becoming more apparent.
At a talent show in February headlined by a local 11-year-old rapper, the chief walked through the crowd of families at the Madeline Rogers Community Center. He greeted the small children, who looked shyly back, and said hello to a pair of young housing officers and the district lieutenant, whom the residents knew by their first names.
The moment was emblematic of all Esserman had wanted to accomplish — a child from the long-troubled Chad Brown housing project, which the police had worked hard to turn around, starring in a show to benefit programs for inner-city teens.
And in the center, surrounded by boisterous, laughing children waiting for the rapper to take the stage, Esserman stood alone.
He had tried to shield his family from the pressures of his job. Then, suddenly, his private life was public.
In early June, the website golocalprov.com reported underage drinking at a graduation party for Esserman’s teenage daughter, Nellie-June. Its reporter outside the chief’s house saw young people running off with beer.
Esserman told reporters that he ended the party when he discovered there were teens drinking. Pare said he was evaluating the situation.
Several days later, the phone rang in The Journal newsroom. It was the same day golocalprov posted a Facebook message it said the daughter had sent out to friends, telling them to bring drinks and “bud” — marijuana, it explained — and not to worry about the cops. The message, as presented by the website, didn’t show her picture or give her name.
Rolando, 27, Esserman’s eldest child, spoke to a reporter he’d never met, on the line from New York City. He’d helped chaperone the party that night, and recalled how youths suddenly started showing up, overwhelming them.
The Facebook message, he said, was a shock.
“My dad didn’t know anything about that,” he pleaded. “I just want to help my dad. He’s being vilified.”
Rolando said he tracked down his sister, who was traveling in Israel on a long-planned post-graduation trip. She was in an Internet café, he said, crying and hysterical.
She’d deactivated her Facebook account before leaving on her trip, because there were strangers trying to “friend” her. Somehow, it got reactivated, he said. And there were other Facebook accounts posted in her name.
“She said she had nothing to do with it,” Rolando said about the Facebook message. And when their father started breaking up the party, she was also “screaming at people to leave.”
The reporter texted Esserman to say that his son was talking to The Journal. The chief texted back in shock: “What?”
A few minutes later, Rolando called again. His father wasn’t happy about him talking to a reporter.
Shortly afterward, the chief responded to requests for an interview: “Thankyou but would rather not at this point.”
Five days later, Esserman said he was resigning.
The sudden news came as a shock to his staff. He’d gone about the department’s regular business that day until mid-afternoon when Taveras announced Esserman’s resignation, effective at the end of the day June 30.
Outside the Providence Public Safety Complex, some officers joked and were gleeful. Others were stunned.
Up on the police station’s third floor, Esserman opened the door to a bright conference room and invited reporters and photographers to join him inside.
The mayor’s director of communications stopped him. We’re doing this in the hallway, she told him. OK, he said gently, and walked through the room to a narrow dark hallway outside the commissioner’s office — the one that used to be his.
A phalanx of reporters crammed around him.
Esserman was composed. Controlled. His face bore a small smile.
I’ll stay and answer all of your questions, he said, and looked into the cameras.
He had only a few things to say –– that it was his decision to resign, that he loved the job and his family, but the party had become a distraction. When the questions began, no matter what he was asked, he stayed on message, watched closely by the mayor’s staff.
“I love this department,” he said, with emphasis. “And I also love my family.”
No more questions, Melissa Withers, the mayor’s director of communications, cut in after a few minutes.
An hour later, Esserman emerged from the commissioner’s office. He crossed the third-floor glass atrium, where 8½ years earlier the mayor had pinned on his chief’s badge, in front of former colleagues, the officers he was about to lead, and his family.
He unlocked the door to the hallway leading to what was still, for the next few days, his office. Alone, he closed the door behind him.
Readmore → Outside the Providence Police, Dean Esserman was the idea man. Inside, he found little acceptance
The priest blessed the casket of the murdered Providence detective. A cruiser’s siren wailed and then faded, symbolizing Jimmy Allen’s last call.
After the thousands of mourners and marchers dispersed, Chief Dean M. Esserman stayed behind.
The night Allen was fatally shot by a suspect inside the Providence police station, Esserman sat beside his body at Rhode Island Hospital and rubbed his shoulders as officers came in to pay their respects.
Now, in the cemetery, he sat alone, until the funeral directors came over to the casket. He helped wheel the casket into the chapel and then followed as it was driven to the gravesite.
In his dress blues, the chief stood with the gravediggers as they poured dirt into the grave.
The gravediggers raked the fresh loam. Esserman stood at the foot of Allen’s grave, raised his gloved hand, and saluted. A Journal photographer, who happened upon the scene from a great distance away, captured the shot.
Printed on the front page the next day, the photo inflamed Esserman’s critics, especially inside the Providence Police Department. He must have known his picture was being taken, they said, and was cynically using an officer’s death to improve his image.
Poser, they sneered.
When Esserman arrived in January 2003, the city’s new mayor, David N. Cicilline, gave him a title that was both promise and curse: Best police chief in the country.
For most of the previous decade, Esserman’s predecessor had been a man built like a bulldog, gruff and defensive, snarling obscenities when riled up. Urbano Prignano Jr. — known to all as “Barney” — smoked in his office at the old police station at LaSalle Square, toy police cruisers on his desk, pictures of the Red Sox on the wall, and the TV on in the background.
Prignano led a department where relatives followed each other onto the job — a place where friendships were built over decades, and scars earned on the street brought more respect than the bars on your shirt.
On his office wall was a framed photo of then-Mayor Vincent A. Cianci Jr., who’d plucked him from a sergeant’s job and promoted him to inspector, then major and finally chief. In the corruption trial that sent Cianci to federal prison, Prignano testified under immunity that he’d helped officers cheat on the promotions tests. “Sometimes your heart controls your mind,” he said.
Outside the department, cops were labeled “Buddy’s Boys.” Residents bristled at police officers in community meetings, screamed accusations of racism and brutality.
Esserman was the anti-Prignano — Upper East Side-New York, thin and balding, with an unsmiling stare that he sometimes directed at people and made them uncomfortable.
He was a Dartmouth man, a former New York prosecutor who had served as police chief in Stamford, Conn., and the Metro-North Railroad, and was assistant chief in New Haven. But he had never been a street cop, and he was only the second outsider ever to become chief in Providence. His critics would ultimately deride him as “Chief Shiny Badge.”
He adopted the cop lingo –– “Did ATF roll on that case?” he’d say about gun arrests –– but his clipped Ivy League manner clashed with the police-officer cadence.
He held himself apart. After work, when other officers headed to the bars to unwind, he went home. Sometimes one of his three children or his wife would call him in the early evening, reminding him about dinner. When the children were younger, he would mention to visitors the books they were reading together.
He was an outsider, and knew it, and that was what was intended. Cicilline’s idea was that the Police Department needed someone to lead it out of the dark days, to help the many decent cops overshadowed by the allegations of corruption to turn around their department.
And in the beginning, Esserman wasn’t alone. Officers at every level jumped at the chance to try a different way.
The new way involved keeping City Hall out of the Police Department and reaching out to the community — building partnerships with other agencies and working closely with city residents.
The vision was Dean’s Way, as some called it. Eventually, his subordinates realized that the discussions often were less about deciding what to do — even though he would phrase it that way — and more about how best to implement his ideas for improving the department.
Not that the chief didn’t want to hear good ideas. Officers who were willing to try something different, or who needed equipment, found support and encouragement. He would get excited and brainstorm with them. “What do you need?” he would ask.
He singled out for praise officers who were working hard to improve the department, even as he blistered those he didn’t think were trying hard enough.
His own ideas forced some to stretch — sometimes into areas they didn’t think were the responsibility of the Police Department. I’m not a social worker, some would complain. I’m a cop.
But as awkward or arrogant as he could be with the department’s officers, Esserman was in his element dealing with those outside it who needed the human touch.
The day after Sterling “Mousie” Washington’s son was murdered in 2007, Washington collapsed in a chair at the Davey Lopes Recreation Center in South Providence. He hadn’t slept since getting the news.
He dropped his head on a table and cried.
Then he felt a hand on his shoulder. He looked up and saw the face of the police chief.
Mousie, I’m so sorry, Esserman said. Please let me know if there’s anything I can do.
Years later, Washington still thinks about that moment.
He’d already buried one son, nine years earlier, when the boy was shot by a man aiming for someone else. No one in the Police Department came to see him then.
That killer had struck a deal by giving information on a higher-profile murder, then he was back on the streets. Washington blamed the justice system, and the police, for letting the man back out. His younger son never got over it.
Now, the boy was dead, stabbed to death outside a nightclub. And here was the chief — a man Washington had met only in passing when Esserman would stop by the recreation center, part of the chief’s perpetual rounds of the neighborhoods — telling him he was sorry.
This was something that Esserman had been doing since he’d become chief four years earlier, away from the media, out of sight of most of the cops. He demanded to be notified about every shooting. He visited the families of victims.
In public, he talked about the devastation felt by the mothers and fathers, a city losing its youths. To cops who’d seen a lot, he sometimes sounded foolish. Esserman hadn’t been a street cop, and he didn’t have the calluses that develop out of self-protection, from witnessing one horror after another.
All Washington knew was that the police chief was looking into his eyes, another father seeing his sorrow.
It was the moment that won him over. His dislike for the Providence police went away.
He saw the chief as a human being. And he started seeing the officers the same way.
Esserman was the idea man, too, the rainmaker, who went to D.C. and spoke to congressmen, who found connections that brought millions back to the city. He told the story about Providence’s work in criminal justice seminars in New York City and before congressional committees.
Each time, he told an enviable story to outsiders, about a police department that pulled itself out of its troubled past and began connecting with the community. He talked about drug-riddled neighborhoods where cops and residents now worked together to eradicate street-level drug dealing. He talked about the children lost to gunfire, what violence did to families and children, and how Providence was trying to end the cycle.
In this world, he was a winner.
One day last year, as talk radio shouted that he should resign after several officers were caught in a state police drug sting, the chief walked into Family Service of Rhode Island and was greeted with smiles and praise.
Here, he was a guest of the agency, which was kicking off an effort to establish a national children’s anti-poverty program. The Providence Police would be a major part of the program, part of Esserman’s passion for helping children, especially those who had witnessed violence.
The chief blended in with the crowd of clinicians and policy wonks, who shook his hand and praised him.
But inside the department, his support was eroding.
In the beginning, many Providence police officers were eager to move forward, to get the department they’d devoted their careers to away from its troubled past.
But as the years went by, Esserman still kept bringing up the past corruption. He would rip into officers publicly, for real or perceived misdeeds. And he was the taskmaster who never let up. He had ideas and wanted to see them through.
Some high-ranking officers complained of burnout. There were endless meetings, phone calls, demands.
At weekly meetings of his command staff — where lieutenants from the districts and representatives of outside agencies shared information, with Esserman, his top deputies and one another — he handed out copies of articles clipped from newspapers and journals about new ideas in policing. He was always reading, intrigued by ideas being debated about criminal justice at universities and think-tanks.
Let’s do this, he’d say, while some of his commanders wondered how they were going to make the latest idea happen.
Some officers were inspired and came up with their own ideas. Others said behind his back: Enough. Smoke and mirrors, they said of his ideas. One bragged that he wasn’t making any arrests as long as Esserman was chief.
Esserman hadn’t been expected to stay long, just long enough to get the department to embrace community policing and uproot the causes of the testing scandal. Even his critics said he had enough connections in the national law enforcement community to keep moving on.
But when he and his wife, Gilda Hernandez, came to Providence, his two younger children were just 5 and 10 years old. They enrolled in schools. And eight years later, Providence was home.
Still, he knew he would always be an outsider in the Providence Police Department.
In a rare unguarded moment one day last year, he said that his younger son, Sammy — who had played with his badge on the day Esserman was sworn in — would have a better chance of being accepted within the Providence Police because Sammy would start as a rookie officer.
By this January things had begun to unravel.
During last year’s election campaign, three of the five mayoral candidates said they would fire him, and the other two — including the eventual winner, Angel Taveras — were noncommittal.
Once in office, Taveras decided to fill the long-vacant public safety commissioner’s post. He chose a man who had once been Esserman’s equal — retired State Police Col. Steven Pare.
Esserman no longer had free rein. When Pare suspended Esserman for a day for threatening to throw coffee into the face of a sergeant who repeatedly coughed while Esserman was giving a speech, other officers were giddy. For years, they’d endured the chief’s sudden temper. Now, finally, someone was holding him accountable.
Pare took back the old commissioner’s office, which Esserman had occupied for all the years Cicilline served as his own commissioner. The chief’s books were removed from the bookshelves, his photos taken off the walls. Esserman moved into a smaller office on the other side of the building. The fiscal staff and assistants remained behind.
Reporters’ questions to Esserman were now redirected to Pare and, sometimes, the mayor’s office. Reporters were no longer allowed to attend the weekly staff meetings.
Over the years, Esserman had always had a veteran cop as his right-hand man and confidant. First it was Andy Rosenzweig, a retired New York City detective, who recommended Esserman for the job and then became his deputy chief. Then Paul Kennedy, who’d risen through the ranks, succeeding Rosenzweig. Kennedy was the buffer between the chief and the rest of the officers, handling the day-to-day running of the department.
And then in February, Kennedy retired. Maj. Hugh Clements, another career Providence policeman, respected by officers, was chosen to take his place. But after his appointment, Clements went out on medical leave until late June.
Esserman still walked in the neighborhoods, dropped by the recreation centers, stopped in at local functions. But his isolation was becoming more apparent.
At a talent show in February headlined by a local 11-year-old rapper, the chief walked through the crowd of families at the Madeline Rogers Community Center. He greeted the small children, who looked shyly back, and said hello to a pair of young housing officers and the district lieutenant, whom the residents knew by their first names.
The moment was emblematic of all Esserman had wanted to accomplish — a child from the long-troubled Chad Brown housing project, which the police had worked hard to turn around, starring in a show to benefit programs for inner-city teens.
And in the center, surrounded by boisterous, laughing children waiting for the rapper to take the stage, Esserman stood alone.
He had tried to shield his family from the pressures of his job. Then, suddenly, his private life was public.
In early June, the website golocalprov.com reported underage drinking at a graduation party for Esserman’s teenage daughter, Nellie-June. Its reporter outside the chief’s house saw young people running off with beer.
Esserman told reporters that he ended the party when he discovered there were teens drinking. Pare said he was evaluating the situation.
Several days later, the phone rang in The Journal newsroom. It was the same day golocalprov posted a Facebook message it said the daughter had sent out to friends, telling them to bring drinks and “bud” — marijuana, it explained — and not to worry about the cops. The message, as presented by the website, didn’t show her picture or give her name.
Rolando, 27, Esserman’s eldest child, spoke to a reporter he’d never met, on the line from New York City. He’d helped chaperone the party that night, and recalled how youths suddenly started showing up, overwhelming them.
The Facebook message, he said, was a shock.
“My dad didn’t know anything about that,” he pleaded. “I just want to help my dad. He’s being vilified.”
Rolando said he tracked down his sister, who was traveling in Israel on a long-planned post-graduation trip. She was in an Internet café, he said, crying and hysterical.
She’d deactivated her Facebook account before leaving on her trip, because there were strangers trying to “friend” her. Somehow, it got reactivated, he said. And there were other Facebook accounts posted in her name.
“She said she had nothing to do with it,” Rolando said about the Facebook message. And when their father started breaking up the party, she was also “screaming at people to leave.”
The reporter texted Esserman to say that his son was talking to The Journal. The chief texted back in shock: “What?”
A few minutes later, Rolando called again. His father wasn’t happy about him talking to a reporter.
Shortly afterward, the chief responded to requests for an interview: “Thankyou but would rather not at this point.”
Five days later, Esserman said he was resigning.
The sudden news came as a shock to his staff. He’d gone about the department’s regular business that day until mid-afternoon when Taveras announced Esserman’s resignation, effective at the end of the day June 30.
Outside the Providence Public Safety Complex, some officers joked and were gleeful. Others were stunned.
Up on the police station’s third floor, Esserman opened the door to a bright conference room and invited reporters and photographers to join him inside.
The mayor’s director of communications stopped him. We’re doing this in the hallway, she told him. OK, he said gently, and walked through the room to a narrow dark hallway outside the commissioner’s office — the one that used to be his.
A phalanx of reporters crammed around him.
Esserman was composed. Controlled. His face bore a small smile.
I’ll stay and answer all of your questions, he said, and looked into the cameras.
He had only a few things to say –– that it was his decision to resign, that he loved the job and his family, but the party had become a distraction. When the questions began, no matter what he was asked, he stayed on message, watched closely by the mayor’s staff.
“I love this department,” he said, with emphasis. “And I also love my family.”
No more questions, Melissa Withers, the mayor’s director of communications, cut in after a few minutes.
An hour later, Esserman emerged from the commissioner’s office. He crossed the third-floor glass atrium, where 8½ years earlier the mayor had pinned on his chief’s badge, in front of former colleagues, the officers he was about to lead, and his family.
He unlocked the door to the hallway leading to what was still, for the next few days, his office. Alone, he closed the door behind him.
