PROVINCETOWN — After a five-month search for a new police chief that included several public meetings, a six-person search committee, nine candidates, and two finalists, Town Manager Alex Morse told the select board on May 12 that he had appointed the department’s lieutenant and acting chief Greg Hennick as police chief.
There are “opportunities for improvement in the police dept.,” Morse told the board, “and I think Chief Hennick is prepared to make improvements, increase engagement, rekindle partnerships, and really lead our department into the future.”
Hennick joined the Provincetown Police Dept. in 2011 and was promoted to lieutenant in 2016. He served under former Police Chief Jim Golden, who was frequently criticized by select board members for his imperious management style and lack of engagement with the community.
Board members were pleased by Hennick’s appointment, offering him warm words and a unanimous confirmation vote.
“Community policing was kind of a failure under your predecessor, and I do believe you’re different from him,” said board member Leslie Sandberg. “I’m delighted that it’s you.”
“You clearly know and understand our town, and you’ve demonstrated that over the course of your career here,” said board member Erik Borg. “I think we should all be really thrilled at this outcome.”
The search committee included six town residents: Council on Aging Director Chris Hottle, Unitarian Universalist minister Kate Wilkinson, licensing board chair Cass Benson, former board of health chair Steve Katsurinis, retired Redwood City, Calif. Police Chief Ed Hernandez, and human resources executive Earl Hinton, who chaired the effort.
The process had included a detailed questionnaire, two sets of interviews, and five “assessment exercises” scored by other police chiefs affiliated with the town’s consulting company, Public Safety Consultants. Hinton told the board it was “one of the most rigorous and thorough processes” he’d ever seen.
Hennick lives with his wife and two young children in Brewster. Hinton told the Independent that the other finalist had been from the Washington, D.C. area, and that six of the nine candidates were from out of state.
In an interview with the Independent on May 13, Hennick said the search process had been lengthy but worthwhile. “I now feel I’ve got the community’s support, and it’s important to me as a leader to know that,” he said.
New Priorities
Hennick had been serving as acting police chief since Golden retired on Feb. 28, and he said one of his first acts had been to call an all-staff meeting.
“In March we had our first department meeting in years — historically we had at least one department meeting before each summer season, but we hadn’t done that since the pandemic,” Hennick said. “At that meeting, I talked about community fear with the change in the federal administration.
“There’s a lot of fear — not just in our community but worldwide — so I said, ‘Let’s be sure to recognize this fear in the community and be a lot more patient and understanding with people, because there’s going to be a lot of strong feelings people are dealing with,’ ” Hennick said.
“We have a badge, we have a uniform — we’re the most visible part of government,” Hennick continued. “We need to adjust our tone and our response to give people a different impression of what law enforcement is and what the Provincetown Police Dept. is.”
To do that, Hennick wants officers to spend more time on Commercial Street on foot patrols and bicycle patrols. “Downtown is where the community is, and it’s where our police officers need to be,” he said.
He also wants to be outside the station more himself, meeting with community groups to hear their concerns. He highlighted two meetings he’s already held with the town’s human services departments and with Bay Cove Cape Cod, a mental and behavioral health center in Hyannis.
“I see all these resources, but do my officers know these services exist?” Hennick said. “It’s my job to communicate that down to the beat cop, so they can say, ‘It looks like you’re having a tough time — I know this program and this person, and they can help you out.’ ”
Hennick said he’ll also be attending a meeting for newly arriving J-1 student workers that the town’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Director Donna Walker is organizing. “We’re going to show up and try to break some ice and change the narrative about what policing is in Provincetown,” he said.
Difficult Issues
The narrative that Hennick aims to change stems partly from a series of incidents in 2023 in which four J-1 student workers from Bulgaria — and two of their American employers — came to the police station asking for help with a landlord who they said was behaving erratically, failing to pay them for work they had done at his properties, and becoming physical in his threats to evict them.
Police officers repeatedly told the students and their employers that landlord-tenant issues were a civil matter and directed the students to file a claim at Orleans District Court.
Their landlord, Paul Schofield, was eventually arrested when Provincetown’s health director witnessed him assaulting one of the students while she was inspecting the rental unit.
“The attorney general’s office puts out a guide for landlord-tenant rights — it’s part of our field training, and I’m not sure why our officers didn’t give that to the J-1 students at the time, because it would have told them to contact the health dept. right away,” Hennick said. “It would have given them the resources they needed to actually solve this a lot sooner. Obviously it escalated into the arrest, but it could have been mitigated prior.”
All the department’s officers know their response to such circumstances should be different moving forward, Hennick said.
On the horizon is another potential challenge: federal immigration enforcement raids that have taken place around the state. At one such raid in Worcester last week, a crowd of civilians gathered and demanded that the federal agents produce a warrant; they refused and took a mother into custody, and then Worcester police arrested the detained woman’s 16-year-old daughter and an unrelated woman, Worcester School Committee candidate Ashley Spring, for disorderly conduct and other charges.
There has been an “outpouring of anger” in Worcester since then, according to the Boston Globe, including at the police dept. over the two arrests.
“Legally, we don’t have any ability to interfere with what ICE is doing,” Hennick said. “We’ve had lots of protests in town that are spontaneous, and we do what we can to honor that because people have First Amendment rights.
“We try to stay as respectful as possible — unless it becomes violent or such a public inconvenience regarding public ways that we have to move the protest — but I don’t envision us placing people under arrest unless they’re becoming violent,” Hennick said. “Provincetown is a unique place. Everybody appreciates their freedom here, and the last thing we want to do is arrest somebody for vocalizing that.”
Hennick said he has already scheduled another all-department meeting for next week to help set expectations for the summer, and he plans to discuss how to handle spontaneous protests.
“This could be an issue in the future,” Hennick said. “I’ll probably cite the Worcester case verbatim, so we have an actual scenario to look at.”
