Providence Police Chief Col. Oscar Perez was on TVs and radios all over the country in December.
After a gunman opened fire in a classroom at Brown University, Perez and the department he runs was thrust into the spotlight. When investigators first caught and then released a “person of interest,” the glare only intensified. And when the hunt for the suspect dragged on through a tense week, it reached a fever pitch.
A month later, Providence Mayor Brett Smiley ordered an independent review of the city’s response to the shooting. He said the initial reports were positive, but that the in-depth review would still offer lessons.
Today, Perez leads a Providence Police Department that has seen violent crime plummet, reaching historic lows last year, even as the mass shootings at Brown and at the Lynch Arena in Pawtucket rattle Rhode Island.
Perez spoke with Ocean State Media political reporter Ian Donnis about fighting crime in Providence, the toll of responding to multiple mass shootings and how ICE raids impact local police work.
Interview highlights
On lessons learned from the Brown University shooting
Oscar Perez: I’ve been able to build relationships in the last 32 years with different federal agencies, and I was getting phone calls asking, “How can we help?” At first, I really wasn’t sure. How can they help? Now I do know. There’s so many things that you need for such an incident.
Some police chiefs will never ever experience something like that, but I do now know that you need personnel. You need to have the right people with the right skillset and you need to have patience. And that’s something that I feel that is something that we as a department learned. We were able to collaborate.
There was some tense moments. I mean, one day is too much. Two days [before] an apprehension is too much. Three days was too much. And then on the fifth day, obviously – or the fourth day – getting that break was important. But it took that collaboration, the whole process. So I think what I learned, and the department learned, is the importance of collaboration.
On the recent reduction of violent crime in Providence
Perez: We are proactively strategizing how to minimize violence in our city. Some of the tactics and strategies that we use have been very positive. As you know, the numbers have been going down and trending down. From violent crime, violent crime with a firearm; robberies are trending down.
But more importantly, obviously, homicides have trended down. We had four homicides last year; two, unfortunately, from the Brown incident. We used to average about 25, 30 when I first came on the job in the early 90’s.
I think, since 2010, the average has been 15. So that’s definitely a number that the city has never seen. I think it’s to commend the work of the men and women of the Providence Police Department. But I’m also not blind, especially [with] what’s going around our nation and how incidents could occur in the spur of the moment. And so we train for that. The only thing we can do is minimize and be alert and be proactively alert. And there’s no way that any police department in the world or in the nation can stop violence… I’m realistic that anything can happen.
On the stepped up ICE raids in Rhode Island
Perez: It’s a difficult situation to navigate for our police officers. Many times the perception of the public is that we’re assisting ICE and that’s not the case. We have a policy that’s pretty strong. We have training that is pretty strong. We’ve had incidents where ICE has responded into the city, and that’s my focus; to ensure that our officers keep our community members safe. I definitely don’t want a Minneapolis to happen in the city of Providence. At the end of the day, our main priority is to ensure that we deescalate so that we don’t have those incidents that have occurred in other parts of this country.
On the level of diversity in the Providence police department
Perez: Compared to when I came on the job, it’s a lot different. I think that our numbers speak for themselves. We’re an extremely diverse department. I got about 116 officers that speak another language. We speak a lot of different languages and I think that that reflects the community that we serve. It’s important for any department to have that.
You can be Caucasian, you can be Hispanic, you can be black, Asian; it doesn’t matter. When you’re culturally competent and you grew up in a neighborhood understanding social challenges, it makes you a way better officer… I’ve always mentioned that when we encounter situations where you understand what’s going on in the household, especially in an urban core, you are going to deal with that a lot easier than someone that grew up in another environment – maybe suburban environment – and doesn’t understand. That has nothing to do with race. That just has to do with being culturally competent with the way you are policing an urban city core.
