Ramsey, ready to move on, reflects

I'm sitting in Police Commissioner Charles H. Ramsey's office, hours after he has announced his retirement at an emotional City Hall news conference.

All morning, the most popular official this city can claim has been shaking hands and posing for pictures, awash in a deluge of reflection and praise.

Then, as if on cue, the phone rings. It's the mayor, who had teared up at the lectern when saying goodbye to his commissioner.

"Hey, man," Ramsey says with easy familiarity.

It's one cultivated over the eight years since Nutter met him at Union Station in Washington to persuade him to come help fix Philadelphia.

It was, by all accounts, something of a blind date. Two men, as Ramsey described it, "looking for someone who was looking for someone."

The soon-to-be mayor, who had staked his candidacy on reducing crime in a city drowning in it. Who knew he could accomplish little if he didn't quell the violence. Who needed change in a Police Department culture defined by glad-handing and backroom favors.

And the retired police chief, the outsider, looking to get back in the game. Who had visited Philly "maybe twice in his life" and had learned about the crime that was tearing it apart via a Google search.

"It was a nice, easy conversation," Ramsey recalled of the train station rendezvous. "What can I say? I just liked the guy."

Now, eight years later, the mayor was calling his partner - the man whose success in combating crime had made so much else possible.

"It's starting to sink in," Ramsey said into the phone. The end, for both of them, was in sight.

But for the city, this is just the beginning. It has to be.

Ramsey has spent the last eight years moving the 6,500-member force forward - sometimes screaming and kicking, but forward nonetheless. In doing so - in insisting on a community-orientated model of policing, in taking on the powerful police union, in refusing to simply arrest problems away, and in not hesitating to fire problem officers - this outsider built a smarter and more just police force.

He became a leader not only in this city, but also in the country, as it grappled with police shootings of young black men and the nature of policing in the modern age.

The cop with the graying hair and the grandfatherly affect has always cut an unlikely figure for a reformer. A cop since he was 18, he hit the street in the tumult of the 1960s, rose through the ranks of Chicago's force at the height of the crack epidemic and somehow emerged with the conviction that police need to be better at building relationships with the communities they serve.

And now, in the midst of the largest dialogue on law enforcement since the civil rights era, he has become a critical voice in the national conversation.

There is still so much work to be done: better transparency, better training for officers, tougher discipline for police-involved shootings, a solution for the many, many neighborhoods still choked by crime.

But Ramsey has brought us to the point where we can have a conversation about how to move forward, instead of simply stemming the tide of violence.

Crime has plummeted. Beat cops armed with data are tasked with targeting criminals instead of alienating entire neighborhoods. The man from Chicago has led the department through everything from corruption scandals - he says he's lost count of how many cops he's fired (it's 260) - to unimaginable tragedy. Eight officers have been lost in eight years.

All the while, he has maintained the outsider status that the department so sorely needed - someone with no tethers to, or time for, the political machinations that often ensnare the powerful in this town.

Which is to say: big shoes to fill.

And now, all signs point to Deputy Commissioner Richard Ross as successor. The veteran insider who's spent his entire career with the department, and the last 12 years waiting for this seat to open up.

Ramsey says he's always disdained handing out favors - that a call to him angling for a promotion amounted to a "kiss of death." But now, by so adamantly singing the praises of his number two, the popular commish has all but anointed Ross.

The outsider has bequeathed his department to the insider.

"You're not going to get any better than Rich Ross," he says.

Of course, this is all up to the next mayor, for whom the stakes could not be higher.

"We can't go backward," Ramsey told me Wednesday. "We can't go back to the old ways."

No, we cannot.

We cannot lose the momentum built at that blind date in Union Station. We cannot return to a department that sees itself as above the communities it serves.

The city moves forward when the insider works like an outsider. Because there is just so much more that has to be done.

So much at stake.

mnewall@phillynews.com

215-854-2759

@MikeNewall