‘Treat people like they matter’: 5 things about new Naples Police Chief Ciro Dominguez

After a four-month process, Naples City Manager Jay Boodheshwar selected Ciro Dominguez as the city’s new police chief Friday. Out of the 175 initial applicants, Dominguez was one of three finalists.

Dominguez will begin his term on Oct. 16, but says he plans on getting in touch with the community prior to his official start.

The Naples Daily News spoke with Dominguez on Monday about his background, priorities, and hopes for the Naples Police Department. Here’s five things to know about Dominguez as the city prepares for the new police chief.

1. Dominguez began his law enforcement career in Naples

As a teenager, Dominguez attended Naples High School before enrolling at Edison College, now known as Florida SouthWestern State College. While in school Dominguez learned martial arts, which he said was his gateway into law enforcement because so many students in the martial arts program were police officers.

“I took a couple of electives, just out of curiosity, at Edison, and I was kind of fascinated by it,” Dominguez said. “I don’t know if it was divine intervention or just curiosity, but something pulled me that direction during that time period and I’ve not stopped ever since. I’ve just always felt like this was a calling for me.”

Dominguez spent 10 years with the Naples Police Department, working his way up to sergeant. After his time in Naples, he worked at the Florida Department of Law Enforcement in Miami before serving at the Hillsborough County Aviation Authority at the Tampa International Airport. Altogether, Dominguez has 38 years of experience in law enforcement. He currently lives in Tampa and will be moving to Naples in the coming weeks.

“It’s the capstone of my career to be able to come back and to really affect the agency that gave me my start,” Dominguez said. “And be able to share with the men and women of that department what I’ve learned through my travels and my experiences in the city I grew up in.”

2. Dominguez has several internal priorities for the department

Dominguez said as soon as he gets to Naples, he wants to meet with his command staff personnel to figure out what they need. He already has a few priorities: cultivating servant leadership, recruitment and retention, internal processes, training and equipment, health and wellness of staff, and proactive community policing.

The new police chief says servant leadership means remembering to lead by serving the public. Dominguez also wants to focus on creating a sense of belonging within the department so officers will stay.

“We don’t want to just keep cycling people through because we lose all that institutional knowledge,” Dominguez said. “If you treat people like they matter, like they make a difference, they will, and they stay because they’re part of the organization.”

He wants to go through the department’s existing processes to see if they’re the most effective and practical ways to run things. If not, he’ll make some changes.

Dominguez said he wants to look into what type of training officers receive within the department and determine if it can be better.

“We should be training above and beyond what the standard is in the state,” Dominguez said.

Having a healthy staff is important to Dominguez as well.

“I want to look at the health and wellness of our people,” Dominguez said. “That’s really important to me. I dealt with it with my commands before, where we had good resilience programs in place. And I want to make sure we if we don’t have one [here], we get one.”

Dominguez’s other initial priority is being proactive in community policing. He said if the police can be proactive rather than reactive, crime rates will decrease.

“The whole idea is to not have crime,” Dominguez said. “That’s how you really judge the police department.”

3. Dominguez has three areas to initially address in the community

Even though he wants to meet with the community before establishing an in-depth action plan, Dominguez said he knows he wants to address traffic safety, crime prevention and education, and nationwide societal issues like mental health and drug-use.

Dominguez said as more tourists arrive, traffic in Naples will worsen like it does every year during tourist season. He wants to work on creating a traffic safety plan to enforce in the city.

Other than traffic, the new police chief wants to help locals be safer with their everyday habits.

“I think also, we need to make sure that we are working with the public in the form of crime prevention, where we’re helping people not be the victim,” Dominguez said.

He wants to make sure residents are educated and prepared for anything, from car jackings to break-ins.

Dominguez says tourism brings people, and their habits, from everywhere so he wants to ensure the community is prepared to handle typical nationwide problems like mental health and drug use.

“Maybe you don’t get it as often in the city, but we need to be as good as anyone else to deal with mental health issues, to deal with all things hurting our society today,” Dominguez said. “Every Naples police officer has to be ready to deal with it in case it happens in our city, or someone comes into our city from somewhere else on vacation.”

4. Dominguez wants to uphold the image and integrity of NPD

Dominguez said sometimes a police department can have its reputation tarnished by a bad officer or an officer who makes a careless mistake. His goal is to ensure that doesn’t happen in Naples.

“I do believe that there have been bad apples, or bad actors, in this profession that we need to deal with,” Dominguez said. “If leaders are paying attention, you get those actors. They’re able to weed that garden and deal with those bad apples before they end up on the YouTube moment.”

Dominguez said he has interviewed potential officers, but turned them down because he felt they weren’t a good fit after speaking with them.

“You hire character,” Dominguez said. “We can train people to drive, we can train people to write reports, you can train people to do all that stuff. That’s important. But I think if you hire a man or woman of good character, who’s had a little life experience, who can see that life is really great, that’s who you want.”

In April, a drunk man broke into the Naples Police Department and stole gear. It took hours before anyone noticed. Dominguez said he never wants something like that to happen again, though he classifies it as an “anomaly.”

“There’s been past events that happened because police officers are human beings and they’re going to have human error, right,” Dominguez said. “Back to the break-in, that was another situation where it was error. One of the things I want to do is look at that and make sure we confirm that never happens again.”

He wants to instill in officers that it’s their job to be trusted leaders in the community.

“Our police department earned the confidence of the public in every interaction, every time you talk to somebody on or off duty,” Dominguez said.

He said he wants locals to feel safe around officers, no matter where they are or what they’ve done. When evaluating a situation, Dominguez wants officers to evaluate the best ways to proceed rather than their first instinct being to arrest.

“We have to look at the entire gamut of why a person is behaving a certain way and then take the action that’s appropriate to their circumstance,” Dominguez said. “Because it’s not just ‘arrest everybody.’ It’s foolish and it doesn’t work and you don’t help people that way.”

5. Dominguez is ready to begin as soon as he arrives in Naples

Though Dominguez doesn’t officially begin his new job until Oct. 16, he says he wants to start meeting with the police department and locals as soon as he moves into the area.

Every time he thinks of or sees a new idea, he writes it down on a sticky note or a piece of paper. Dominguez said his home in Tampa is flooded with ideas.

“My whole desk and dining room table is full of papers of ideas that I just can’t wait to get down there,” Dominguez said.

Once he starts as police chief, Dominguez hopes to have a detailed action plan ready for the public by mid-January.

This article originally appeared on Naples Daily News: 5 things to know about new Naples Police Chief Ciro Dominguez