Beverly Police Chief Talks Revised Use-Of-Force Guidelines

BEVERLY, MA — When Beverly Police Chief John LeLacheur hears so many opinions around "police reform" he looks at his own department and says he sees many of the suggestions are things that he feels are already policy within the city.

The hope is that communicating those policies will help local residents understand that their priorities are the same priorities for those sworn to protect and serve them.

Part of that communication comes with the Community Advisory Committee forums the department is hosting remotely amid the coronavirus health crisis, and part of it may be the formalized revised "Use of Force" guidelines that are part of the department's bid for Massachusetts Police accreditation.

"A lot of people get their news from national sources," LeLacheur told Patch. "When they watch cable network news, and they see something in Los Angeles, they think it's the same in Beverly. They see something in Chicago, Minneapolis, and they think it's the same in Beverly. They don't always know what goes on here."

LeLacheur said an instance of that in the wake of some of the spring and summer protests included residents asking him why the department does not use a mental health worker to help mitigate certain situations.

"I tell them we've had a mental health worker in our department we do use," he said. "They look at these other cities and say, 'that's what's wrong with police,' when we already have it.

"People also talk about the use of the chokehold. No one in the Commonwealth has ever been taught to use a chokehold in any situation."

Having the use-of-force guidelines written out for public access is designed to help. LeLacheur said while most of what is in the guidelines were already part of department training, some were never in a written policy.

One aspect of that is the "duty to intervene" that states department members or required to intervene if another officer is using excessive force or violating protocols.

"The duty to intervene is something we would always do anyway," he said. "That's part of our training. But it is now formalized in the policy."

He added that "de-escalation" is the department's priority in any situation where a use of force may be necessary.

The full draft of the policy can be found here.

"It's important to get our message out there," he said. "We encourage people to ask questions locally and let us answer them locally.

“We want to have good conversations about what we are doing. When you talk about the realities of what police officers do, you have to look at the (coronavirus) numbers we're dealing with along with everybody. Look at the number of police officers who have died of COVID in the United States. It's up to more than 300 nationally, so our officers have been dealing with the threat of that along with everything else.

“With that, we just try to push the message that we’re open to talk. Ask the questions if you have them. Not everyone may always like the answers, but we will answer the questions.”

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(Scott Souza is a Patch field editor covering Beverly, Danvers, Marblehead, Peabody, Salem and Swampscott. He can be reached at Scott.Souza@Patch.com. Twitter: @Scott_Souza.)