Three basic tenets:

All people have value.

Those who go wrong, given half a chance, can often find a way to redeem themselves.

Those in danger deserve immediate, effective protection.

Three ideas that combine a hard-nosed pragmatism with a determined idealism. An unusual belief system for a policeman, perhaps. But Donald Gosselin, UC'87, is no ordinary Boston cop.

He's a lot more interested in helping people than punishing them, for one thing. And, for now, he's traded his former East Boston district for a larger and more complicated jurisdiction. Since 2004, Gosselin has been working as an adviser to the U.S. State Department in the Republic of Panama, helping to reshape the police forces in that emerging democracy.

The southernmost nation in Central America, Panama was a military dictatorship until 1989, when the United States invaded and removed General Manuel Noriega from power. Earlier in his career, Noriega had been the head of Panama's secret police; he was also a former CIA operative and an accused drug trafficker.

Once he was out of the picture, Panama faced a major challenge. Noriega had conflated the army and the police into a single entity that was abusive and authoritarian. Now the country needed a well-trained, legally functioning nonmilitary police force.

The United States sent police advisers to help. But such advisers generally come from federal agencies, not city departments, and that's not always the best fit. If you're policing the streets, it helps to have street-level experience.

Gosselin does. At forty-six, he has more than twenty years of experience in a Boston police force that's undergone its own significant transformation. In fact, when he started studying Panama's police force, charged with maintaining law and order for each of the country's 3.1 million citizens, he saw much that was familiar.

"What I found in the Policia Nacional," he says, "was a department that in many ways resembled the Boston Police Department of 1979—no technology, top-down management, keeping its own counsel."

All things Gosselin knew he could help change.

"It's what you do that matters"
Even as a youngster growing up in the Hyde Park section of Boston, Gosselin was attuned to social issues most kids never notice. "I saw many problems," he says simply. "Poverty, political corruption, racism, social injustice."

His awareness was heightened by the instruction he received at Catholic Memorial School, a private school in West Roxbury run by the Congregation of Christian Brothers for boys in grades seven to twelve. It was, Gosselin says, "an education all about community service. The Christian Brothers' mantra is, It's what you do that matters—because what you say really doesn't."

  On the waterfront: A Fullbright first brought Gosselin to Panama City in 2003.

At Catholic Memorial, Gosselin decided he wanted to serve the community as a member of the Boston Police Department (BPD). Anything else, he says, would have felt like he was turning his back on the problems he saw.

And he wanted an education. So, in September 1978, he enrolled at Northeastern and started to work toward a bachelor of science in criminal justice. In December 1979, he became a police cadet. He joined the BPD as an officer in the field services bureau.

"I began my career full of enthusiasm and new ideas," says Gosselin. "But the first casualty for any rookie is his sense of innocence and naivet?©." It didn't take him long, he says, to see that in many ways the BPD was "a hidebound, parochial, and inbred institution that rejected any new idea."

In Roxbury, for example, the new District 2 police station "resembled a pillbox on the Norman coast," he says. "The message to the community was loud and clear—we were an occupying force. That wasn't the type of approach to policing I had in mind."

As Gosselin worked as a cop, he chipped away toward his bachelor's degree. It took him nine years to get it, "one small piece at a time," he says. He went on to earn a doctor of law and jurisprudence at Suffolk University Law School in 1994.

It was at Northeastern, Gosselin says, that he learned to look at situations carefully. "My classes taught me to follow the evidence and not to prejudge. And that every complex problem has a simple solution that is almost inevitably wrong."

He also studied historical contexts. He says he remembers criminal justice dean Norman Rosenblatt stressing that "our system of justice wasn't just cobbled together happenstance. Rather, it evolved over millennia, and many key thinkers contributed to its development: Plato, Hammurabi, the Hebrews, the Romans, Napoleon, Rousseau, Locke."

But Gosselin was especially inspired by a living example. Assistant criminal justice professor Jim Reed had been convicted of rape and assault as a young man, and served years in the Massachusetts prison system. After he was released, he counseled parolees in Roxbury, earned a master's in education at Harvard, worked as an urban-planning consultant at Arthur D. Little, then joined the criminal justice faculty at Northeastern, where he became an assistant dean and cofounded the university's African American Master Artists in Residence program.

Reed "never hid the fact that he was convicted of rape and that he paid for his crime with a lengthy prison sentence," Gosselin says. "The fact that he was given a second chance by both society and academia speaks volumes about his redemptive journey. From him, I learned young people have the capability of making mistakes and later achieving great things."

Fix the broken windows
On the force, Gosselin was attracting the attention of people who wanted to change the way the Boston police did business, people like Al Sweeney, then a member of the BPD command staff and a Northeastern lecturer, today the associate director of the Northeastern University Police Department. Sweeney recognized Gosselin "was one of those outstanding recruits you come across from time to time. He was driven, motivated."

By 1985, Gosselin was a detective working in the drug control unit, the youngest detective in BPD history. He went on to serve as an agent on a joint Boston Police Department?ÄìDrug Enforcement Administration task force, then as an internal affairs investigator.

James Claiborne, now the BPD's chief of professional development, was attentively watching Gosselin's progress. "Don puts his heart and soul into policing," he says. When Claiborne was made the captain of District 7, East Boston, he requested Gosselin be assigned there, too. From 1995 to 1999, Gosselin was a sergeant detective in East Boston. In 2001, he took over as the district's detective commander, supervising as many as eight other detectives.

In the early 1990s, a new attitude had started gaining momentum at the BPD. It was an approach based on the "broken windows" theory of policing, which holds that basic quality-of-life declines can lead to escalating spirals of crime, fear, and disorder.

Curb social problems while they're still small, still at the level of vandalism, vagrancy, or public drunkenness, say broken-windows proponents. Community outreach forms one prong of the approach. Aggressive policing is the other.

  A national force: Gosselin in the saddle at a Panamanian festival.

By the time he got to East Boston, Gosselin enthusiastically endorsed this new mindset. Father Robert Hennessey, pastor of the Most Holy Redeemer parish—he calls Gosselin "a great man"—remembers how the detective introduced himself to the largely Hispanic neighborhood.

"He literally came to the door, asking what we could do together," the priest says. "He established a series of meetings on Sundays—not the most convenient time for the police or for us, but that was when our parishioners could make it. He brought the police captain over here. Sometimes there'd be only one or two people, but the numbers grew."

Not long after the outreach began, an East Boston resident was killed by two police officers. "Before, that would have caused an explosion," Hennessey says. This time, the captain came for another neighborhood meeting, and a sense of calm prevailed.

And when a young boy was arrested, Hennessey recalls, "Don went to the family's home, told them what was going on, guided them through the process, and gave them advice. He went out on a limb for them."

But assertive enforcement was always part of Gosselin's style, too. Sometimes he'd resort to elaborate stratagems to catch the bad guys. In 1997, for instance, he and fellow officer Joseph Fiandaca figured out a way to round up at-large repeat offenders. Under the guise of a fictional company called Crown Casting, they sent out individualized letters to people on the East Boston want list, telling them they'd been selected to work as extras on a film starring Robert DeNiro and Wesley Snipes.

In a boiler room set up at the police station, officers fielded telephone inquiries from eager would-be stars. Several weeks later, undercover police set up a mock soundstage on Boston's waterfront, and a fleet of specially marked MBTA buses were dispatched to bring East Boston's most-wanted in from different locations around the city.

Seventy-five offenders were arrested that day, and at least a hundred others turned themselves in over the following weeks. Gosselin and Fiandaca received the BPD's annual problem-solver award in recognition of their success.

All the police strategies seemed to be working. By 2004, East Boston's violent crime rate was roughly equivalent to what it had been in 1969. Despite the victories, though, there were constant frustrations, many revolving around language.

"The biggest problem in this community is the communication barrier," explains Arthur McCarthy, Gosselin's successor as chief of detectives in East Boston. The neighborhood is home to many recent Hispanic immigrants. About 60 percent of the population speaks English as a second language—or doesn't speak English at all.

Even so, for a time under Gosselin's watch District 7 didn't have a single Spanish-speaking detective. Muggings began to be more common on Friday and Saturday nights, as people left work with money in their pockets. Though Gosselin assigned decoys and extra patrols, they weren't bilingual and therefore had little impact. He pleaded with the BPD brass to give him at least one bilingual detective; he got nowhere.

Gosselin thought the situation was so serious, he convinced the department to give him vacation time so he could go to Costa Rica and put himself through language school to learn Spanish as quickly and intensively as possible.

His initiative, his BPD colleagues say, was starting to outstrip what the department was ready to support.

An offer from the State Department
Along with his responsibilities at the BPD, Gosselin taught at local colleges. In 1999, he became the Longwood Professor of Criminal Justice at Newbury College, in Brookline. He was also an adjunct law professor at Curry College, in Milton.

One day, a Newbury colleague mentioned to Gosselin she thought the ultimate challenge for any educator was winning a Fulbright Scholar grant, because it requires such a high degree of fluency in another language and culture.

Intrigued, he applied for a Fulbright. And got one. It took him to Panama City, Panama's capital, for three months, from September to November 2003. He designed and presented a series of conferences for the Policia Nacional on police modernization, professionalism, and accountability.

Fourteen years after the U.S. invasion, Panama was an interesting laboratory for an activist cop. The civilian police still weren't connecting with their communities. Officers and residents viewed each other with mutual distrust. Signs of serious disorder were everywhere, including the violent youth gangs who were taking control of Panama City's ultra-impoverished barrios.

The U.S. government's early attempts to create an effective Panamanian police force had failed. As Gosselin explains, "I can't think of any FBI agents who go to community crime meetings. I can't think of any FBI agents who answer domestic violence calls. That's why it's necessary for these kinds of advisory positions to be staffed by police officers."

   "Don integrates himself": Agulero (right) visits Gosselin at home.

His advice to Panama's police in his talks to them: Be a cop who will enforce the law without fear of consequence, but be a real member of your community. Among those persuaded of the wisdom of this approach was Jon Danilowicz, director of the U.S. State Department's narcotics affairs section in Panama. It was through Danilowicz that Gosselin got an offer to return to Panama in 2004 as a full-time adviser to the State Department.

Gosselin believes even his job title speaks volumes about the attitudes he's there to reverse. "My official title is law enforcement development adviser," he says. "The term 'law enforcement' died a quiet death in the late seventies, but I guess the State Department never read the obituary. Law enforcement is really only a small part of the modern police mission. I'm really here to help brother officers develop the policing profession as a whole."

Today Gosselin lives in a house he's bought in Panama City on a former U.S. Air Force base. It's a typical two-story middle-class residence, with a patio and an open-air living area.

On the job, nothing is typical, Gosselin says, because the challenges are so varied: "On any particular day, I could be at one of the police academies, or meeting with a zone commander, a strategic planning board, the police technology board, the attorney general, prosecutors, detective commanders, the minister of government. That's the beauty of this career."

Gosselin works closely with Bartolom?© Aguero Martinez, the recently promoted chief of the Policia Nacional's metropolitan division, which polices Panama City. The crime in Aguero's district accounts for nearly 65 percent of Panama's total crime.

Before Gosselin, Aguero says, the police in Panama "were reactive. Every day, we went out on our streets and expected something to happen. We didn't control what we did."

Now Gosselin is teaching them to use different strategies, Aguero says. And he has credibility because "he's a policeman, a cop. The people preceding Don were either diplomats or DEA, and they had a focus based on their knowledge. When we spoke about community policing, at-risk groups, community involvement, these were not concepts they took to well. But Don integrates himself with our job. He's very respectful. He's lived in these situations, and that allows us to understand each other."

Jaime Jacome de la Guardia, director of Panama's National Technical Judicial Police, the force charged with investigating crimes once they've occurred, says he's benefited from working with Gosselin, too. "We talk about transparency and integrity," Jacome says. "We're developing a project to enhance our capacity to manage a crime scene, and we have a technology project that will allow the chief of police and his staff to manage and share information.

"This is bringing a dynamism to the police," he says. "We understand better what we are doing."

One strategy Gosselin emphasizes is empowering beat officers to identify and solve problems. He believes the people who are closest to a problem have the best chance of fixing it. This is the opposite of the top-down management style used in paramilitary police forces. "Police officers who are managed top-down are nothing more than soldiers or robots waiting for their superiors to give them orders," he says.

Instead, Gosselin wants a take-charge attitude to operate at all levels of the Policia Nacional. Community leaders have their own part to play as well. Driving through one of Panama City's poorest, most crime-ridden neighborhoods, where the average income hovers around seven dollars a day, Gosselin recalls for a visitor how he convinced bank officials in Boston to let undocumented immigrants open bank accounts.

Such a shift reduces the business that goes to illegal moneylenders and high-interest check-cashing shops, he says, and saves low-income residents money. It helps lower the number of burglaries by eliminating a primary target for thieves—cash stored at home. It also encourages citizens to trust in their government's capacity to ensure a civil society.

It's not just altruism. It's a good example of problem-oriented policing. Being able to open a bank account demonstrates that social opportunity is available to everyone. For policemen like Gosselin to build trust within a community, the community as a whole has to invest in the effort.

Like "turning a supertanker"
Sometimes the challenges facing Panama's police seem almost insurmountable. Gustavo Perez, the director of the Policia Nacional until July 2005, ticks off a couple without hesitation. "We don't have a budget for bulletproof vests or vehicles. About half the police on the streets don't have radios."

The starting salary for police officers is just $300 a month, yet many officers buy their own cell phones so they're able to communicate on the job.

Gosselin has an annual budget of a little over a half-million dollars. Though it's not a lot of money, it's supported the creation of a nationwide crime database and an intranet that aids in crime analysis, transparency, and accountability. These investments have allowed the Panamanian police to devote their own scant resources to buying police cruisers and equipment.

Some of the procedural changes Gosselin has helped introduce at the Policia Nacional seem basic but, in fact, represent a significant break with tradition. For instance, any police officer can now pull over someone who commits a traffic offense, something only members of the traffic division were authorized to do before. And the 2,000-person camouflage-wearing paramilitary unit that patrols Panama's borders will soon no longer be part of the Policia Nacional. "Soldiers make bad cops, and few cops make good soldiers," Gosselin explains.

Gosselin likens his work with the Panamanian police to "turning a supertanker a hundred and eighty degrees on the high seas. It isn't done by yanking on the rudder but incrementally, by degrees.

"All the top-echelon commanders were once soldiers," he says. "All were trained as soldiers. Convincing them their form of management is counterproductive to effective policing is a daily face-to-face exercise. You win them over one at a time. When we convince a sufficient number of them to embrace modern practices, that's when the tipping point is reached and true organizational change is achieved."

Coincidentially—assisted by Danilowicz, a Worcester, Massachusetts, native—Gosselin is also engaged in another painstaking feat. In a country staunchly devoted to the New York Yankees (Yankees closer Mariano Rivera is Panamanian), he's persuaded a small cadre of policemen to become Red Sox fans.

Those who know Gosselin say that he sees his policing work as a mission, that he takes the motto "Dios y Patria," tacked to his office wall, very seriously. McCarthy, the detective commander who succeeded him in East Boston, puts it this way: "On a spiritual level, I think Don feels a mandate to do the right thing."

   Urging transparency and integrity: With Jacome (left).

Gosselin is working with the State Department on a year-by-year contract. Whenever he finishes his assignment, he says, he hopes Panama will stand as a beacon of good policing in the Americas. When Venezuela or Cuba decides to civilianize their military police forces, he hopes they'll want to come to Panama to learn what to do.

The lasting legacy of his work in Boston suggests his efforts will succeed. "When Don left East Boston," Father Hennessey says, "I thought the progress he'd made would collapse, but it's gone on because of the groundwork he laid."

McCarthy pinpoints the reason why his predecessor's efforts have staying power. "Don's not shy about involving others," he says. "He's not a one-man show."

In Panama, Aguero says, "it doesn't matter whether Don is here or I am here. We've learned a culture. Many of the people from the U.S. we've worked with in the past, it takes them a long time to learn and then they leave." The experience with Gosselin has been different, he says—more of a conversation between people who speak the same language and want the same things.

Gosselin learned this language in classrooms and on the streets of Boston. Now he's sharing it with an entire nation, to help its citizens build the kind of lives he believes they deserve.

Chris Fauske is associate dean of arts and sciences at Salem State College, in Salem, Massachusetts.

  Iliustration by Elizabeth Flurry
  Photography by Chris Fauske