David Gambacorta and Dana DiFilippo at the Philadelphia Daily News offers a piece on the new Philadelphia Police Commissioner.
Come January, the entire city - and a police force of 6,500 men and women - will be watching Ross' every move, analyzing every quote, trying to determine what kind of leader he will be.
Ross knows he is inheriting the top job at a pivotal and difficult moment in the history of law enforcement. Police departments across the country are grappling with an unprecedented identity crisis in the face of growing calls to reform their policies and procedures, and to commit to never-before-seen levels of transparency.
But Ross brings something to the table that might make him uniquely qualified to navigate these choppy waters: a willingness to listen.
But what does that actually mean, as Ross prepares to take over for retiring Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey, whose popularity with Philly residents and the law-enforcement community casts an impossibly long shadow?
According to Ross, it means he will be reaching out to rowhouse dwellers and rank-and-file cops alike, at town-hall meetings and in small gatherings, to find out what they need from him.
"In my view, if a police commander thinks he knows what every community wants, it's a tragic error," he said.
"You don't know what people need unless you listen to them. And that holds true for police officers, too. You need to have a dialogue with the men and women you ask to do this job. If you don't include them in the process, you're really headed for trouble."
Ross' journey to the top of the fourth-largest police department in America began in the Fern Rock section of North Philadelphia, where his parents, Richard and Virginia Ross, raised a house full of kids.
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