Last week Police Commissioner Ed Davis announced that Kelley McCormick would replace Frank Mancini as D-7’s new captain. Mancini has been promoted to Boston Police Superintendent.
With a little over a week on the job, McCormick has jumped head first into his new assignment here in Eastie. McCormick has been making the rounds in the Eastie and spent time walking the neighborhood and attending community meetings like Monday night’s Jeffries Point Neighborhood Association.
At that meeting, McCormick fielded questions from residents on quality of life issues like graffiti. At the meeting, McCormick made a pledge to work with Judge Roberto Ronquillo to hold vandals in the neighborhood accountable for tagging.
“It’s one of those little problems that is a big deal to me,” said McCormick Monday night. “I will be working with Judge Ronquillo to ensure that if we catch someone doing graffiti we are going to charge them with all the graffiti they are responsible for in the neighborhood and have them fix it. I’m of the opinion that if they thought it was important enough to spray paint a business or a home they can go back and repaint that business or home.”
McCormick, whose roots run deep in East Boston, is from an Irish family that settled here from Newfoundland in the 1890s.
McCormick spent time in Eastie and Springfield before returning to Homer Street during high school. A graduate of UMass Amherst, McCormick studied literature, took classes at a college in County Cork, Ireland and eventually went on to receive his law degree from Suffolk University Law School and is a member of the Massachusetts Bar.
Inside the Department, McCormick has been a rising star on the force. He’s served in BPD’s gang unit, was a Captain in Jamaica Plain and most recently served as Deputy Superintendent of Labor Relations.
“I really loved working over in Jamaica Plain because when there were things going on community the community worked with the police to solve a problem,” said McCormick. “It wasn’t an attitude of, ‘we have a problem what are you going to do about it?’ but more ‘We have a problem and what can we do about it together?’”
McCormick said he knows Eastie to have the same attitude.
“I worked a lot in the community and know it’s a very easy community to work with,” he said. “It’s a community that asks ‘what can we do to help?’ and we need as much help from the community as we can.”
McCormick said the one percent of the job is enforcement and the other 99 percent is community policing.
“A small very part of this job is enforcement and I think we do a very good job,” said McCormick. “But community policing is really about the other 99 percent of this job and that is being proactive and educating residents to solve problems.”
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