The Holyoke Police Department is getting a new police chief today. Brian Keenan will be sworn in at City Hall.
Holyoke Mayor Joshua A. Garcia, who selected Keenan, state Sen. John Velis, D-Westfield and Hampden County District Attorney Anthony Gulluni and others will be in attendance.
Before Keenan rose to the rank of captain at the Springfield Police Department where he worked for 27 years, he was a young officer who said he wasn't at the station a lot. Keenan said he was out in the community.
“You ate your meals in your district when you used the bathroom, you used the bathroom in your district,” Keenan said. “When you needed to use a telephone, you would use the businesses. They'd loan you the phone. So you made these great relationships with your local stores, with the restaurants and all those people.”
He said there are a few top issues he wants to address in Holyoke.
"It's speeding, it's loud barking dogs. It's quality of life stuff. And we're going to get our open spaces great and clean and the place where kids and family want to enjoy recreation,” Keenan said.
Public defender Kate Murdock, who is the attorney in charge of the Committee for Public Counsel Services (CPCS) office in Holyoke, said she understands quality of life issues for residents.
"But at the same time, using it as a policing priority and potentially bringing out the full resources of the police, whether that's arresting people, giving them large fines, that's not going to make anyone particularly amendable towards the police. It's going to make them feel annoyed [or] irritated,” Murdock said.
Murdock said studies show broken windows policing or the idea that if police departments addressed minor problems, then maybe the bigger crimes wouldn't happen, doesn't work.
“The issue is that if you want to fast forward to some night in the future where there's been a shooting or something else that's more serious and you need those same individuals to give you information…[t]hey're not going to be interested because you have already made those relationships strained,” Murdock said.
Keenan takes the job following former chief David Pratt's retirement at the end of July. City officials organized a search committee that held public forums and conducted interviews with candidates, sending two finalists to Garcia. The other candidate dropped out. Keenan was interviewed and selected in early December.
City Councilor Israel Rivera said he respects Garcia’s pick and is interested to see how Keenan addresses structural issues within the police department.
“One of the main things I've been focused on is the strategic planning part, like the part where you're strategically moving pieces within the department, where it's cost effective for the city and it's efficient for the department,” Rivera said. “We spend almost $1 million a year and a little more than that on overtime. How are we going to rectify that problem?”
Keenan said he’s ready to win the community’s trust.
