Hamburg police chief tackles cancer while revamping department
Kesner overhauls Hamburg town police
Carmen Kesner thought he had a cold.
His sore throat was an irritation in the fall of 2007, while he was angling for the top job in the Town of Hamburg’s police force.
That September, the Town Board named him chief of police, fulfilling his long-held ambition. Shortly after that, he received a frightening diagnosis.
During the past 16 months, Kesner, 59, has led a sweeping overhaul of the 60-member department while fighting throat cancer.
“The department comes first — every chief wants to leave it better than it was,” he said. “I just don’t want to leave it yet.”
Refusing to surrender his career, he has undergone chemotherapy and radiation treatment in Roswell Park Cancer Institute, while overseeing changes in the department.
As difficult as that sounds, Kesner said giving up the job he had sought for so long would have been harder after more than 30 years on the force.
“You just keep going,” he said. The chief has demonstrated reserves of fight. In June, he helped arrest a 29-year-old carjacker — getting a black eye in the process.
Meeting him, you wouldn’t guess he’s still taking down fugitives.
With a full head of white hair and a deep voice made deeper by illness, Kesner seems as much like a politician as a cop. He’s shown he can navigate town politics, winning the support of Supervisor Steven J. Walters and the rest of the Town Board.
After Joseph Coggins retired following eight years as chief, the board appointed Kesner in September 2007 by a 4-0 vote, with one abstention: Kesner’s wife, Councilwoman Joan Kesner, who refrained from voting.
Walters credits the new chief with boosting the Police Department’s morale while halting costly practices.
“He’s been able to implement these changes — all these good things have been done in the last year and a half,” Walters said.
Kesner, formerly the assistant chief, reorganized the department to cut one captain’s job, boosting resources available for patrol.
More important, the reorganization made the chief’s job a white-collar management role, ineligible for overtime pay.
Kesner’s salary for this year is $110,989, compared with nearly $300,000 that his predecessor made during his last year on the job.
“[Kesner] felt the next chief needed to set an example,” Walters said.
The reorganization also involved appointing two assistant chiefs, Michael Williams and John Conlon, who also are ineligible for overtime.
Conlon handles administrative duties and detective squads, while Williams oversees patrol, putting a high-level officer in touch with the men and women on the streets. About two-thirds of the department consists of patrol officers.
“It’s better for taxpayers,” said Joseph Kilian, president of the United Council of Hamburg Taxpayer Associations. “Carmen stepped up to the plate and did it.”
The new look the department has adopted over the past year — new arm patches for officers, a Harley-Davidson motorcycle and black-and-white cruisers instead of blue — are emblematic of deeper changes.
“I think it’s more open,” Kesner said. Ideas to improve the department are coming from the ranks.
The changes include uniforms made with fabric designed for activity. Trainees in simulations now face dummy bullets that sting, but don’t wound, to enhance realism. And driver training receives greater emphasis, since officers are more likely to be injured in a vehicle than by a gun-wielding adversary.
Kilian, the taxpayer advocate, applauded the department’s new “civilian police academy,” an outreach program designed to show the public how police work.
“I thought it was all coffee, doughnuts and traffic tickets,” Kilian said. He changed his mind after getting an inside look at the department’s SWAT team and high-tech crime fighting tools. “They have an awful lot of capability.”
The department also began holding an annual get-together for officers and their families.
“It’s a thank-you for families, for all they put up with during the year,” said Williams, the assistant chief. The demands of police work have a way of disrupting family life.
Exactly what the future holds never is certain. But Kesner said recent test results show that treatment has beaten back the cancerous growth.
Kesner said that he will have minor surgery to remove a lymph node in his throat but that the threat of cancer has receded.
If the illness returned and interfered with his ability to run the department, Kesner said he would leave. But the tests indicate he will get to keep the job.
“I’m in great shape,” he said.
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