Local government managers have myriad responsibilities, all of which compete for their time and attention. On any given day, some responsibilities will be more important than others. When a vacancy occurs in a key position on the manager’s executive team, however, the responsibility of conducting a search to fill that vacancy with the best possible candidate immediately becomes a high priority. When the vacant position is that of chief of police, the task of filling it becomes a high priority indeed. In fact, choosing a police chief may be the most important hiring decision that a local government manager can make.

The city I have managed since 1987, Grand Rapids, Michigan, is an urban-core city in western Michigan with a population of about 200,000. It is fairly diverse, with African Americans constituting 18 percent of the population, Hispanics 7 percent, Native Americans 1 percent, and Asian Americans 1 percent. The balance of the population (73 percent) is Caucasian. The city, which was established in 1850, is one of the oldest council-manager local governments in the country, having adopted this form in 1916.

Grand Rapids has enjoyed remarkable stability among its key management staff. Personally, I have worked for the city for more than 26 years, spending 13 years as city manager. The police chief whose retirement caused the vacancy we had to fill had been chief for 16 years. Both tenures are far longer than the average, especially considering the politics of a city the size of Grand Rapids. This article describes how we went about hiring a new chief, and, regardless of my colleagues’ community sizes, I hope it will help those managers who might be involved in the same process.

The Retirement Announcement
When the chief of police informed me of his decision to retire in September 1997, the news didn’t exactly make my day. You know how it is when you finally assemble a great management team—you want it to stay that way forever.

I had a good working relationship with this chief. Revered by much of the community, he was respected by the members of the police department and the city commission. He had exceptional political and communication skills. He never made messes he didn’t clean up. In short, I rarely needed to spend time and energy solving problems involving the department.

Many of my peers in the profession know what a luxury this is. Fortunately, he gave me plenty of advance notice—four months—so that I had until mid-January to jump-start the search for a new chief before the old chief’s last day on the job.

I decided that it was important to notify the city commission of the chief’s planned retirement without delay. On the same day as the chief told me of his plan to retire, I called the mayor and asked if the chief and I could meet with him privately, and the two of us shared the confidential news with him. I then made plans to assemble the city commission on the following Monday morning but did not share the chief’s retirement plans with the commissioners until then. After the commission meeting, I informed the public of the chief’s impending retirement in a news release.

Intuitively, I knew that the best interests of my city would be served by a thorough but swift selection process. Local residents get edgy when their police department lacks a permanent chief. A protracted period without a replacement for our retiring chief would, I reasoned, unnecessarily add to people’s fears about crime and the city’s ability to combat it. At the same time, it could take a long time to plan, organize, and execute a search without some outside help.

Outlining a Search Process
To expedite matters, I decided to explore the use of an executive search firm. Grand Rapids is a fairly conservative town, especially when it comes to spending money. (I suppose most managers would say the same of their own communities.) As a result, I couldn’t assume that my bosses on the city commission would support my recommendation to hire a search firm, so I decided to start by doing some homework.

Clearly, the process of hiring a police chief would be unlike the one ordinarily used to select other department heads. I had been minimally involved in the process my predecessor had used 16 years previously to hire the chief who now was leaving. I recall its being a totally atypical process compared with the search for any other department head, primarily because of the intense community interest in this important public safety position.

Although it seemed wise to enlist outside help, I quickly concluded that I did not want to invite an advisory committee to conduct the interviews on my behalf, and I didn’t want these to be public interviews. At the same time, I knew that the community would be clamoring for meaningful involvement in the process. I knew we were off to the races in this regard when the local Urban League chapter called a news conference to demand its involvement even before calling to discuss its members’ concerns.

The need was to lay out a plan for the process swiftly. Otherwise, the procedure would be defined by others. I also needed to make it clear to everyone early on that our city charter made it my ultimate responsibility to make this hire. Elected officials can easily get confused on this point when such a visible and important position is involved.

Citizens often do not understand the council-manager form of government and, by extension, the hiring authority of the manager. The police chief frequently is more visible than the manager (and sometimes even the mayor). For some reason, citizens don’t think of the police chief as having any boss, or, if they do, they assume it’s the mayor or the elected council.

For all of these reasons, I decided to devise the plan in broad outline and get it out to the city commission and the community as soon as possible. I wrote a memorandum to my bosses at the start of the process—exactly seven days after the news release on the chief’s retirement announcement. The memo shared with the city commission these six conclusions that I had reached, as well as a rough timetable and budget:

1. The process of finding a new police chief would have to begin immediately.
2. A national search would be conducted.
3. The city needed to obtain the assistance of a qualified executive search firm.
4. I would rely on an internal search team of key staff members.
5. I might choose to rely on an advisory committee to assist me in evaluating some of the top candidates for the position (something I never did).
6. Because it was being done correctly, the recruitment process would take some time and money.

To save time, I dispensed with the writing and distribution of a formal request for proposals. Instead, as I had learned that there were credible search firms that did nothing but police executive searches, I invited them to send information quickly. After this handful of proposals had arrived, I immediately narrowed the field to two, both of which I asked to send a representative to a face-to-face interview with several staff members and myself. I knew that the consultant who would be working for us would have to be able to communicate with the community, in addition to having a sure grasp of the basic mechanics of the executive search process.

In the end, I chose a consultant because of the research and development reputation of the organization (especially with regard to community policing and community-oriented problem solving), the extent of its contacts with and knowledge of progressive police professionals throughout the country, and finally the confidence I acquired in the person who would be performing most of the work.

Price was a factor, though not a big one in my book. I figured that the cost of a search that ended in the hiring of the ideal police chief would be cheaper than the “cost” of a possibly less expensive process that caused the appointment of the wrong police chief. I’m not sure that’s the way local residents saw it.

Rather than surprise the city commission with my plan, I met individually with each member of the commission to sell the advantages of using a search firm and to make sure that my recommendation to offer a contract would be favorably received. This proved to be time well spent, because the city commission unanimously approved my recommendation. Our city attorney’s office assisted in the preparation of a contract for the work to be performed. The contract was swiftly executed, and we were on our way!

Early on, I decided that I would need an internal search team of trusted advisers to help with all aspects of the process. I wanted a small but well-rounded group of professionals with differing perspectives. It also was important that the persons selected be able to keep the process entirely confidential until we were ready to go public. I chose the human resources director, the equal opportunity director, the deputy city manager (who has line responsibility for planning and development functions), and the assistant city manager for neighborhood services.

On the basis of race and gender, we happened to be a reasonably diverse group: two white men, one black man, one black woman, and one Hispanic man. One of our objectives from the start was to do our utmost to end up with a diverse group of finalists to choose from. This was impressed upon the search consultants from the beginning.

Soliciting Input
The human resources director and I worked with the consultant to compose an inviting job announcement, which was then advertised in Police Chief magazine, the Michigan Police Chiefs newsletter, Crime Control Digest, the Police Executive Research Forum’s Subject to Debate, and several other newspapers and journals.

The next major task was to design a meaningful process for public and interest-group input. Because I was determined not to relinquish my responsibility and authority to make the final decision to hire, I needed to assure the city commission and the community that I was listening to the voices of every legitimate stakeholder in the outcome of the search process.

Once again, I needed to come out with my plan as soon as possible so it would not be a plan that others had invented for me. Thus, we pulled out all the stops to collect information from all segments of the community. Because Grand Rapids is a big city with lots of opinions on any given subject, I wanted to be sure that the process would involve input from all community segments, including any “silent majority” there might be.

The approach we used was multifaceted. The consultant started with private half-hour interviews with each member of the commission: seven sitting members and three members-elect, who would not take office until January. A special meeting was arranged for the search consultant and me to meet with the city’s community relations commission, a diverse seven-member board with the quasi-judicial duty of conducting hearings and deciding on issues involving compliance with a number of city policies, to eliminate prejudice and discrimination and to ensure equality of treatment and opportunity to all.

The next group whose input was particularly important was the police department itself. Private, individual interviews with the consultant were arranged for all of the top command members of the department (the deputy chief and the captains) and for the presidents of the police unions. A Police Task Force consisting of volunteers from within the department (civilians, experienced as well as new employees, and uniformed employees from all units within the department) also provided excellent input. We didn’t forget to include the outgoing police chief, but care was taken not to let the retiring chief influence the process excessively.

Because the government of Grand Rapids is team-oriented, and because we see community policing as evolving into community-oriented government in which all city departments collaborate in new ways to better serve our customers, I felt that it was important to solicit the input of other departments. The consultant and I met with groups of staff, including my executive cabinet, and the consultant met individually with key department directors, including the fire chief, the director of parks and recreation, the streets and sanitation director, and the city attorney, among others.

The internal search team and I also believed that we needed a structured approach to soliciting input from a variety of other interest groups, many of which were most anxious to be involved in the process. We decided that the consultant and I would meet with small groups (10 to 12 persons each) representing each of the following: neighborhood associations (Grand Rapids has 35 such associations, some dating back to the 1970s), businesses (hosted by the chamber of commerce), African Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans, students (in both the public and private schools), senior citizens, and the criminal justice community (officials such as the county sheriff, prosecuting attorney, city attorney, district and circuit-court chief judges, probate judge, U.S. attorney, and a couple of practicing attorneys and members of the local bar association).

It was not easy to decide whom to invite to each of these meetings. We wanted to keep these gatherings small, but we also wanted to ensure that no one would complain of being left out. I relied heavily on the internal search team in coming up with the final list of persons to be invited to these meetings. The team’s collective knowledge of the community resulted in the selection of a well-rounded group.

To provide chances for general public input, we hosted a citywide public forum in the commission chambers in city hall. Also, I hosted a live call-in cable television show one evening on which the search consultant briefly talked about the process before we opened the phone lines to the viewing audience.

We established a dedicated, 24-hour phone hotline on which callers could leave one-minute messages concerning the search process that were recorded and later transcribed. We used the city’s Internet page to invite comment and plugged into the area’s virtual conference capabilities via a network of Internet pages. We invited the public to fax us their opinions and advice and devised a simple questionnaire in both English and Spanish that was inserted in the daily newspaper, as well as in several weeklies that focused on the minority communities.

This questionnaire—which was titled “Who Should Wear This Badge?”—asked for responses to three open-ended questions:

• What qualities are you looking for in a new police chief?
• What would you expect a new police chief to accomplish in the first year?
• How could a new police chief make the police department more effective?

Residents commented that they were surprised and delighted to be asked for their opinions. The effort we went to and the thoroughness of our efforts to obtain input from the entire community earned us praise from the news media, the general public, and virtually every segment of the community. More important, after digesting all this input, I felt that I had gained a sure feel for the pulse of the community in terms of its hopes and dreams for a new police chief.

Lest you think that the input-gathering process was horrifically time-consuming, let me assure you that it wasn’t. Our news release announcing the call for general public input was issued on November 3. The deadline for such input was November 14. All of the interviews with city commissioners, police department staff, other city staff, and all of the interest groups, as well as the public forum and cable television show, were conducted from November 10 to 12. Advance planning was the key to accomplishing so much in so little time. After this whirlwind of input, we were amply prepared to move on with the search.

The search consultant compiled, digested, synthesized, and distilled all of these contributions into a seven-page summary of the qualities and abilities the community desired in the prospective Grand Rapids police chief.

Outreach Efforts
Throughout November and December, the consultant directly recruited candidates to apply for the position and gathered recommendations from a variety of sources. More than 200 calls were made. The consultant sent a package of materials to prospective candidates that included: a copy of the advertisement, recent newspaper articles on the search and on issues facing the police department, a department organizational chart and budget, a copy of the profile report, public relations materials on the city, a city budget, city statistics, a copy of the police department’s mission statement, a copy of Grand Rapids magazine, housing information, a city map, chamber of commerce literature, and issues of the city’s various newsletters for staff and the public.

Our first closing date for applications was December 31, but in retrospect, I would not have selected New Year’s Eve as the deadline. With the holidays, I’m sure that some candidates were simply too busy to turn their attention to the task of preparing and submitting a resume. As it turned out, the deadline was extended slightly to provide time for stragglers and to afford more time for the consultant to approach directly some candidates who might not otherwise have applied. Altogether, when the final deadline came, 52 resumes had been submitted.

Application Screening
The search firm then went to work on screening the resumes, gathering references, and performing a periodical search on the best-qualified candidates. By the middle of January, the search firm had completed its preliminary review of all candidates.

Rather than ask the search firm to narrow the list down on its own, I decided to travel to its offices and peruse every resume that had been submitted. The staff provided candid assessments of each of the candidates and the reasons why the search firm had separated them into different categories for different levels of consideration. I decided to perform this first cut by myself, without the aid of my internal search team, in part to maintain the highest level of confidentiality, for I was adamant that there would be no leaks.

The internal search team would work with me to narrow the list to the handful of finalists, who would then be introduced to the general community. This decision worked out better than expected, especially given the extraordinarily inquisitive nature of the news media in Grand Rapids.

The time I spent privately and confidentially with the consultant proved invaluable. In a short time, we had explored the fit between the profile the firm had constructed and a great variety of different candidates, some from large communities, some from small, some with extensive experience at different levels, some with less experience but with obvious potential. My thinking was challenged on several fronts.

I was encouraged to consider “up-and-comers” from places far smaller than Grand Rapids, as well as candidates from much larger organizations. We also discussed candidates with unusual experience or atypical backgrounds. In the end, we narrowed the field to 15 or 20 candidates. I returned home with resumes and other paperwork on this smaller group of candidates for more extensive review and screening with the internal search team.

At about this time, I was disappointed to learn that one of the most promising candidates had been offered the job of police chief in another city. That candidate could not wait for our process to conclude and took the other job. I learned from this experience that it is important to move swiftly lest you lose a top candidate to another suitor.

The internal search team and I met on three occasions in the last week of January, sometimes connected by conference calls with the search firm, to debate the relative merits of the candidates and to narrow the list down to a small group we’d invite for interviews. We had a fairly strong consensus on nine candidates: four from inside the department and five from outside. We were intrigued with two additional outside candidates but not so intrigued that we were willing to pay all of their expenses to come for interviews.

So we elected to conduct videoconference interviews with these two candidates while bringing the others to Grand Rapids for their interviews, recognizing that this constituted some disadvantage for the two off-site candidates. But the alternative was not to interview them at all, and our curiosity was too great to let that happen.

Initial Interviews
The first round of interviews with these 11 candidates was conducted over two days in mid-February. Tours of the city were scheduled for out-of-town candidates with confidential executive-office staff. Hotel accommodations were arranged by the city, with all expenses being directly billed to us. In an effort to preserve privacy during this phase, hotel reservations were made under fictitious names. The interviews (except those conducted by video teleconference) were held in a penthouse suite in a downtown hotel. Top hotel management and security staff were briefed and aided in keeping the candidates’ identities and the process itself confidential.

Because no members of the internal search team were police professionals, we asked the consultant to help us by finding a highly respected police chief from elsewhere in the country to participate with us in these first-round interviews. We didn’t want to put the retiring police chief in this position. We asked the police chief of St. Paul, Minnesota, to serve this purpose, and he was helpful to our process. Before the interviews, the consultant composed some 50 potential interview questions, which the internal search team winnowed and revised down to a dozen that were actually used.

We managed to get through this entire process of candidates’ coming to town, lodging in a downtown hotel, touring the city, being interviewed, and returning home without the media ever finding out. Although media organizations eventually learned the names of the four internal candidates, they never did learn those of the other semifinalists who were interviewed but didn’t make the list of five that we announced when we were good and ready.

We took great satisfaction in this success. Several of the candidates told me of their personal gratitude for the professional nature of the interviews and for the effort we had expended to assure their confidentiality.

Selection of Finalists and Second Visits
After considerable debate and soul searching, the internal team ended up with five finalists whose identities, we agreed, we would publicize. The finalists included two internal candidates and three outside applicants. The breakdown of the finalists by race and sex was three white men, one African American man, and one white woman; we had succeeded in coming up with a reasonably diverse group of finalists, although we would have welcomed even greater diversity. The finalists also represented variety in type and length of experience, as well as of the sizes of the communities in which they had gained that experience. Included in the group were a woman from the largest police department in the country and a man from a southern town of 20,000 people—one-tenth the size of Grand Rapids.

A carefully scripted news release was prepared. Notebooks were assembled for each member of the city commission containing all available background information on each of the five finalists in tabbed sections, as well as information on the plan for the balance of the process. Photographs were obtained of the finalists for use by the print and electronic media.

Everything worked precisely according to plan. On Saturday morning, February 28, I hand-delivered the notebooks to the homes of all members of the commission. A memo accompanied the notebooks announcing the selection of the finalists, advising commission members that the news would be breaking the next morning, and outlining the steps remaining in the process. On Sunday morning, March 1, at precisely 8 a.m., my confidential secretary hit the fax button that simultaneously sent the news release containing the names of the five finalists, along with a short biography of each, to all local news media. I waited at home for the phone to start ringing. It didn’t take long.

On March 2, four of the five candidates returned for a second visit. The fifth had an emergency in her department that at the last minute precluded her coming, and she later withdrew. Throughout the day, informal meetings were arranged for the remaining candidates to meet and chat with the mayor and interested city commissioners. Informal mini-interviews were arranged for other key members of the executive team and top management staff so they could get to know the finalists.

Six officials were included in the mini-interviews: the assistant city manager for fiscal services, the assistant city manager for public works services, the assistant to the city manager, the fire chief, the city attorney, and the parks and recreation director.

All finalists were interviewed again by the Police Task Force. Outside candidates were invited to bring their partners, who were taken on tours of the city. Tours of police facilities were scheduled for the outside candidates. We even arranged a news conference and had each candidate deliver a five-minute statement, generally answering the following questions:

• Who am I personally? (What are my defining characteristics?)
• What kind of police chief can you expect me to be?
• What are my impressions of the city of Grand Rapids and its people?
• What uniquely qualifies me for the position of police chief of the city of Grand Rapids?

We also included one of our homeless citizens, who had shown a strong interest in the process. At the same time, we left out some of the traditional “captains of industry,” reasoning that it was more important to include persons who were destined to have more extensive contact with the police department. We asked all of our invited guests to make notes of their impressions of the candidates and to give these impressions in writing or orally to any member of the internal search team or to any of four other “community hosts,” whom we had picked for their demonstrated trustworthiness and fairness and had used as confidential personal advisers throughout the process.

After all of this, we hosted a private dinner for the candidates and their spouses, the city commission, and the members of the internal search team. It had been a long, grueling day for the finalists; however, we learned an incredible amount about the candidates in these various settings.

Finalists took personality profile tests and met privately with the acting deputy chief of police before returning home. At the conclusion of this second-interview phase of the process, I had almost all the information necessary to make a selection. All that remained were final reference checks, which I conducted, and formal background checks, on which I had help from the acting deputy police chief. After these reference and background checks, I felt no need to visit the community of my top candidate, for I honestly felt that I knew him thoroughly.

Public Announcement of the New Chief
The public announcement of our choice for police chief took the community somewhat by surprise—not so much because of who the choice was but because of the speed with which the final decision had been made. Because I had asked the 100 persons who attended the private reception for their feedback on the candidates, many of them seemed to think they could take a couple of weeks to get back to me, even though we had made arrangements with our community hosts to collect the reception guests’ input on the same evening. Perhaps, they imagined that I would want to narrow the field further, to a couple of candidates. Or, they may have supposed that I would take the time to visit the top candidate’s community.

Aside from my general inclination to be decisive when I have all the information needed, however, there was another reason for me not to dally. My top candidate was being wooed with another job offer, from California. He had put off responding to the other offer for as long as he could and needed to make a decision. Quickly, I made it apparent to my top candidate that we wanted him in Grand Rapids. After a series of quick telephone calls and faxes, the job offer was negotiated successfully and evidenced by a formal letter of agreement.

Attention then turned to how to make the public announcement. A news release was drafted, which was edited several times with our soon-to-be police chief. Although it would have been nice to have the new chief with me for the announcement, together we decided that we could avoid this nicety and expense.

So, just three days after the finalists had left town and four days after the public reception, we faxed a notice to the news media at 8:30 a.m. that I would be making an “important announcement regarding the future leadership of the Grand Rapids Police Department” at 9:30 a.m.

As expected, the media were quick to respond. The news conference was attended by all the major news-gathering organizations. I also invited key staff from the department to be there. When the time came, I read a prepared statement (basically a summary of the news release), responded to a few questions, and then breathed a great sigh of relief.

While I was conducting my press conference in Grand Rapids, our new chief was doing the same in his home community. The only ones notified of the appointment in advance were the seven members of the city commission, the internal search team, the city manager and city council of the community from which the new police chief was coming, plus, of course, the search firm. The swiftness of the decision entirely averted what could have been a fractious political process, fraught with interest-group lobbying on behalf of particular candidates. Even the daily newspaper was caught off-guard.

Postscript
In retrospect, I can say that I would not do one thing differently if I had the process to do over again. The media coverage of the entire process was uncharacteristically positive. But more important, we had made great progress toward developing a five-year strategic plan to implement community policing and community-oriented government in Grand Rapids. We fully expect that the investments we made in time and money will pay handsome dividends for years to come.

Kurt Kimball is city manager of Grand Rapids, Michigan.

This article is adapted from Selecting a Police Chief: A Handbook for Local Government, published by ICMA and the Police Executive Research Forum, Washington, D.C. For order information (item number 42370), visit ICMA’s Bookstore & More online at http://bookstore.icma.org.
 

Copyright © 2000 by the International City/County Management Association (ICMA)