As the department’s Special Operations lieutenant, Keller was in the thick of things. He recalls it as the best assignment of his career because it blended day-to-day contact with community with the most dramatic kind of street police work.
“You had an opportunity to connect with people, to hear their problems,” said Keller. “And you had the (officers) right there in the room to go out and address those problems.”
Big promotion
In 1998, following Riggins’ death, Keller was promoted from captain to chief, bypassing then-deputy chief Paul Watzka. (Watzka left the KPD and went on to lead the Town of Ulster Police Department before retiring last year.) While the crack epidemic was winding down, the blight and gang subculture remained entrenched in Midtown which has remained to this day the focus of the KPD’s efforts.
A few years ago, Keller, who holds a master’s in social policy from Empire State College, submitted a white paper to city officials in which he argued that the problems in Midtown Kingston were, to some extent, beyond the scope of law enforcement. As long as Midtown remained a pocket of concentrated poverty, Keller wrote, police would be limited to controlling, rather than eradicating, persistent quality-of-life problems like prostitution and drug sales. His answer called for the creation of home ownership-incentive programs to draw more middle-class residents to the area and elevate the economic profile of the neighborhood.
“It dawned on my that throughout all of my years here we had tried many, many different strategies for policing Midtown, but the complaints about Midtown are the same as they were many years ago,” said Keller. “If that’s the case you have to ask yourself what’s the root of the problem and as I see it, the root of the problem is high-density poverty.”
That hasn’t stopped Keller from trying. As the department’s overtime budget has declined over the past few years, he has increasingly worked with state police and the Ulster County Sheriff’s Office to coordinate efforts within the city. In 2006, he helped get Kingston included in the statewide Operation IMPACT crime fighting program, which directs state and federal funds to police departments to try innovative policing strategies and enhance their technological infrastructure. In 2007, he contributed the department’s entire five-member narcotics squad to URGENT, a countywide drug task force run from the sheriff’s office. More recently, he has formed a street-crime unit to carry out proactive policing, including prostitution stings in Midtown.
Deliberate, and proud of it
Most of the criticism Keller has faced during his tenure has revolved around his cool —some argue detached — attitude towards management and community relations. Keller is not the kind of police chief who swings a battering ram on a drug raid, or stands up in front of a camera to promise swift and severe retribution in the wake of some heinous crime. He is known to operate quietly as he juggles the competing, sometimes irreconcilable demands of budget, public safety and union rules. It’s an approach that Keller learned over a 40-year career and one he is happy to defend.
“You have to evaluate things before you make decisions, you try not to react too quickly or out of anger,” said Keller. “I find that when you try to make responsible, very deliberate decisions and consider all your options, things work out better.”
Along with day-to-day policing, Keller has had to deal with a few big, high profile events, most notably a November 2005 rally at City Hall which drew a few dozen neo-Nazi supporters and a few hundred outraged counter-demonstrators. The rally, organized by white supremacist radio host Hal Turner, followed a pair of racially charged assaults involving Kingston High School students. Before the rally, Keller fell back on his experience in community outreach calling for calm from city residents. When Turner and his followers arrived, Keller, operating from a command post on Golden Hill, coordinated the efforts of 250 law enforcement officers to move the protestors from a municipal parking lot to City Hall and back without a single act of violence or arrest. Keller would learn later, much to his chagrin, at the time of the rally Turner was leading a double life as a paid FBI informant.
