Not the retiring type

The city is seeking permission to let Police Chief John LeLacheur work beyond the mandatory retirement age of 65

There was a time when it seemed like every story I wrote about the Beverly Police Department involved some type of controversy. I don’t want to rehash them here, but more than a few of the incidents had very serious consequences.

These days police work seems more difficult than ever. But for the most part, the Beverly Police Department has been pretty free of controversy over the last few years.

You have to give a lot of the credit for that to Chief John LeLacheur, who has been the police chief since 2013. The problem is that he turns 65 in May of 2027, the mandatory retirement age for police in Massachusetts.

But there’s a way around that. Earlier this month Mayor Mike Cahill began the process of getting permission for LeLacheur to work beyond his 65th birthday. It’s being done via what’s called a home-rule petition, which would waive the mandatory retirement age for LeLacheur. The City Council has approved the petition, and now the request must be approved by the state Legislature and the governor. The whole thing can take awhile, so that’s why it’s starting now, more than a year ahead of time.

I recently sat down with LeLacheur in his office in the ‘new’ — as in 2021 — police station on Elliott Street. He has the corner office on the third floor, with two big windows giving him a view of the Bass River across the street.

“It’s an ocean-fed river so I joke that I have an ocean view,” he said.

LeLacheur was hired by former Mayor Bill Scanlon shortly after LeLacheur retired as a New Hampshire state police captain. I wrote at the time that he was believed to be the first person from outside the department to be named chief. A highlight of his state trooper career came in 1999, when he was awarded the New Hampshire State Police medal of valor for pulling a fellow officer to safety after his cruiser had been hit by rifle fire.

LeLacheur has generally gotten high marks for his performance here in Beverly. In Cahill’s letter to city councilors asking them to approve the home-rule petition, he said LeLacheur “does a tremendous job for the City, and is both physically and mentally fit to continue to work well past the mandatory retirement age.”

To get another opinion of the chief, I reached out to Bob Broudo. Broudo, a Beverly native, was the longtime head of the Landmark School in Beverly. He has served on the police department’s citizen advisory committee since it formed in 1995.

Broudo said LeLacheur and the department have been remarkably open and responsive to questions and suggestions at the committee’s meetings, which are open to the public. He said that approach has built up trust between the community and the department.

“He’s just a good person,” Broudo said. “He’s a solid person. He’s smart. People respect working with him. I think he’s built a strong team and they have confidence in each other.”

Broudo said police quietly do things that most people don’t know about, like giving unhoused people rides to a doctor in Middleton who treats them for free.

“It’s not like they’re out to punish people,” Broudo said. “They’re out to make things right. That’s such a wonderful way to be.”

The big questions for most police chiefs these days center on immigration. I asked LeLacheur if ICE has been in Beverly.

“I’m sure they have been,” he said. “They do their operations without us as you know. We’re prohibited by state law from enforcing deportation orders, so we don’t get involved in those cases at all. If there are felony warrants it’s a different case.”

LeLacheur told me that Beverly police do not notify ICE if a person they take into custody has a deportation order. A couple of days after my interview with him, the city issued a proclamation on immigration stating clearly that “our police will not stop, seize, hold, arrest or detain an individual solely based on immigration status, a civil detainer request, or a civil administration warrant”.

LeLacheur said the police department’s biggest challenge is maintaining its current level of services. Beverly had 65 police officers when he arrived in 2013. They’re now up to 74. It’s still below the 80-plus the department once had back in the day, and with the city facing a $4 million budget deficit, that number is not likely to increase anytime soon.

“Hopefully there’s no major events that impact the city,” he told me. “You keep all those things in the back of your mind. You train for the worst and pray for the best. We are a unique city in that we have an airport, two train lines, a harbor. A lot of cities this size don’t normally have those type of things. Any of those things could be impacted. We have three very large industrial parks between Cummings Center, Cherry Hill and Dunham Road. And then you have a major highway with 128. Two colleges. We have to be ready for anything to happen and hope if it does we fall back on our training and experience.”

LeLacheur said the department is still working through some changes it made in recent years, including going to civilian dispatch and implementing a new records management system. I’m glad I don’t have to write anymore about what used to be the department’s No. 1 complaint, the woefully outdated police station they were in for decades next to City Hall.

Beverly has had a couple of shooting incidents over the last year or so, but LeLacheur said crime is generally low. He called Beverly “one of the safest cities in the Commonwealth if not the nation.”

“I attribute that totally to the work that the officers do,” he said.

LeLacheur said one of the biggest problems they’re dealing with now are Bitcoin scams. He said scammers are convincing people to buy Bitcoins at Bitcoin machines, only to end up losing the money they put in. Last fall Beverly police helped a man retrieve $90,000 he had put into a machine, but LeLacheur said it’s tough to stop those transactions if police aren’t notified within 24 hours. He said police are planning to work with the City Council to come up with a new ordinance banning Bitcoin machines.

“Some of these people who come up with these different scams totally convince people they’re going to make money,” he said. “It’s awful.”

So, back to the mandatory retirement age. I asked LeLacheur why he wants to continue working beyond age 65.

“I don’t consider age to be a stop line,” he said. “I still enjoy the work. I still enjoy working with the people.”

LeLacheur said he could work up to age 70 if the city gets the waiver, but his pension would be locked in at the amount he would have received if he retired at 65.

The city got one of these waivers a few years ago that allowed former Fire Chief Paul Cotter to work until he was 66. A quick Google search shows that police chiefs have worked beyond 65 in Taunton and Springfield.

“I probably consider myself a rarity that I’m still doing this and want to continue,” LeLacheur said. “I basically started doing this full-time when I was 20 years old. I still love the work. I still love the people around me and working with the public. I’m glad the mayor wants me to stay on at this point. We’ll see where it takes us.”

LeLacheur said he also enjoys the work he does beyond Beverly, as the incident commander for the Northeastern Massachusetts Law Enforcement Council. NEMLEC, as it is called, is a consortium of 68 police departments and two sheriff’s departments in Essex and Middlesex counties that work together, including responding to larger emergencies.

LeLacheur said NEMLEC will be busy this year providing support for events like the World Cup soccer tournament in Foxborough and the Tall Ships visit to Boston.

Since the mandatory age is in place for a reason, I asked LeLacheur about his health,

“Perfect,” he said, laughing. “No, for a person my age I feel pretty good. Like anybody else I try to maintain a balanced diet, trying to get more exercise in. I get a good workout with the grandkids (he has four).”

LeLacheur said he and his wife, Frances, have fallen in love with the North Shore since moving to Beverly. It looks like they might be here for a while longer.

“I’m blessed I’ve had the opportunity to be here,” he said.