SWAMPSCOTT — The Select Board accepted the town administrator’s recommendation on Wednesday night to appoint Dr. Ruben Quesada as the town’s new police chief.
“I really am proud of the work that went into finding the new police chief,” said Sean Fitzgerald, town administrator. “We’ve gone through a really extensive recruitment and selection process and involvement of the public.”
Before voting on the appointment, the Select Board held a public interview of Quesada.
Quesada first came to Swampscott a few years ago when he was visiting one of his three daughters at the Harvard Summer School.
“I fell in love with the area, fell in love with people,” said Quesada.
He said he would like to work for the Swampscott Police Department because he can see the community values, civic engagement and dedication to inclusivity and equity.
“I already see that the police department is on a very solid footing with Chief Kurz’s leadership and Chief Madigan’s leadership,” Quesada said.
He would strive to enhance the department’s community engagement and build on the principles of 21st-century policing, Quesada said. He wants police officers to be a part of any important function in the community and youth activities on the weekends and not just do “Coffee with a Cop” events for photo opportunities.
“Without public trust, we are hopeless as a police department, in any police department,” Quesada said.
He plans to work both on hiring the right people and retaining officers that are already in the department, as well as conducting training and making sure the town has a highly professional police force.
“As the chief, it’s my duty and obligation to ensure succession planning, to ensure that our officers throughout the department are trained as leaders in our town, in our community,” Quesada said. “We have to care about the community, but we also have to care about our officers and the training and their wellness and their well-being.”
Quesada, 51, was born and grew up in Phoenix, Ariz. He served on the Mesa Police Department (MPD) for 25 years.
As a police officer, Quesada rose through the ranks from a patrolman to being promoted to commander of one of the four Mesa patrol districts, and then to a commander at the Office of the Chief.
As the commander of the Central Patrol District in Mesa, a city of 500,000 people, Quesada supervised 135 sworn and civilian employees and managed a $20 million budget. He created the first in the country Community Engagement Policy for MPD, designed to quantify community policing in the department and led the department-wide response to COVID–19, while working at the Office of the Chief.
Quesada received a doctorate degree in education and organizational leadership from Grand Canyon University in Phoenix in 2017 and served as adjunct professor at the Department of Criminal Justice at Benedectine University, Mesa, for four years.
After moving to Massachusetts in 2020 to be closer to family, Quesada worked as deputy chief of police at Northern Essex Community College in Haverhill and an instructor at the Massachusetts Municipal Police Training Committee, teaching diversity, equity and inclusion and police culture.
Quesada is a fourth-generation Mexican American. He is fluent in Spanish. His mother was a volunteer with the Phoenix Police Department and a strong role model to him, Quesada said.
At 16 years old, Quesada was arrested for possession of marijuana and placed into a program for at-risk youth. As a result, Quesada met several Phoenix police officers in the Police Activities League who mentored him and instilled in him values of integrity and hard work.
“I wanted to be like those police officers and that’s what got me into law enforcement,” said Quesada.
About a dozen Swampscott police officers came to the meeting to support their new chief.
“Men and women in the Swampscott Police Department are more than excited to welcome Dr. Quesada,” said Officer Kevin Reen, president of the Local 417 Swampscott Police Union. “We know his leadership and experience will help bring us to the next level of policing.”
The new chief will start working on March 28. Interim Police Chief David Kurz, a consultant with Municipal Resources, Inc., who coordinated the chief search, will move back into his consulting role and stay in Swampscott for a couple of weeks to help Quesada settle into his new position.
Kurz said that he enjoyed working with Swampscott on helping to “weed out or weed in” candidates and emphasized that the process included a lot of community involvement of the town’s residents.
