Swampscott Police Hiring Logjam Breaks With 7 Officers Sworn In (2024)

The new officers increase the department's diversity and come after two years of struggles to hire outside of the civil service system.

Posted Thu, Dec 21, 2023 at 12:38 pm ET|Updated Thu, Dec 21, 2023 at 4:17 pm ET

The four women and three men joining the department, as well as the two new Swampscott Fire Department hires, dramatically increase the gender and ethnic diversity of the department and help fill out ranks depleted from retirements and hiring struggles in recent years.

In September, following a months-long hiring process that resulted in only one conditional offer being extended to a pool of 65 preliminary candidates, Town Administrator Sean Fitzgerald and Police Chief Ruben Quesada pledged a revamped effort to find new, qualified officers and get them on board amid what Union President Kevin Reen called a hiring "crisis" within the department.

"The timelines just don't work," Fitzgerald acknowledged to the Select Board in September, "and we really have some great ideas about how to expedite the timeline and move forward in addressing some of those critical staffing issues."

On Wednesday night, those staffing issues got some relief with the swearing-in of Nicolas Cruz, Samuel Harrell, Nicole McGee, Angelica Noble, Joan Pena, John Posada and Briana Sanchez to the police force, as well as Santiago Garcia and Jonathan Tibbo to the fire department.

"Tonight is very important for our town, for our department for our community," Quesada said. "This past hiring round we set clear goals and objectives to find the most qualified, most diverse, and most well-rounded individuals with the lived experiences that are greatly needed in today's law enforcement profession.

"It is because of the exceptional men and women of the Swampscott Police Department that we not only met our goals but we exceeded them and we made Swampscott police history."

Quesada said the department is now 13 percent female, 16 percent Hispanic and that the department has hired its first African-American candidate in the history of the town.

The hirings came almost exactly three years after the town left the civil service system. Fitzgerald told Patch that shifting away from civil service led to "growing pains" as the town sought to find "the most diverse and most extraordinary men and women to join these departments and help us meet the broader demands of public safety."

"While I wasn't here when we exited civil service I am ecstatic not to be bound by it," Quesada said on Wednesday. "Many of my police chief colleagues have been met with a ton of challenges and snafus.

"Even the largest police departments in the Commonwealth cannot find the kind of formula for success that we found here."

Fitzgerald told the Select Board that this group of hires should be celebrated in the town and used an example for other communities.

"I look at all the faces of these individuals and there's not one of them that would have been hired under civil service," he said. "I don't want people to miss that. Not one of these individuals would have made it to that microphone. And I think about 20, or 30, or 40 years from now when their children and others look at these individuals and think: me too, me too.

"That's such a point of pride for this town. If Swampscott can do this, every other place can do it. And we should let the world know it's time to change."