It turns out that a police department run by a “DEI chief” in a city with a gay Democratic mayor can do some damn fine detective work.
Welcome to Providence, Rhode Island.
For most of the past six days, this city and its leaders have been raked through the mud on social media and cable television, painted as a place led by bumbling, incompetent losers who had no prayer of catching the man who killed two Brown University students and injured nine others in a mass shooting last Saturday.
If racist, homophobic fearmongering mixed with dangerous conspiracy theories is par for the course in our current news and entertainment ecosystem, it’s the naysayers here at home who bug me most of all. The ones who seemed to actively root against solving this heinous crime because it might further their own political agenda, or justify their intense cynicism.
Apologies aren’t necessary.
But can we try saying “thank you” for once?
It took hundreds of local, state, and federal law enforcement working around the clock over the last six days to crack open this case, which ended Thursday when 48-year-old Claudio Manuel Neves Valente took his own life after officers tracked him to a storage facility in New Hampshire.
Police say Neves Valente is also responsible for the shooting death of MIT professor Nuno F.G. Loureiro on Monday evening. Neves Valente is a former graduate student at Brown and is believed to have attended the same school in Lisbon with Loureiro in the late 1990s.
Just as Chief Colonel Oscar Perez promised it would, it took remarkable police work to catch Neves Valente, including a timely tip from a hero Brown graduate – currently only known as “John” – and plenty of technological support across three states.
Anyone who watched the daily press briefings over the last week can see that there were a lot of cooks in the kitchen working to solve the case, and at times it didn’t always seem like everyone was on the same page.
But every time it seemed like things were beginning to go off the rails, Perez stepped up and assured the city, the state, and the world that progress was being made.
Rather than give him a chance, too many vile, online instigators assumed that his accent – which can only be described as Rhode Colombian – meant the only reason he had his job was because he was Latino.
What those internet cowards didn’t bother to understand is that Perez is the ultimate cop’s cop, a guy who has been on the job in Providence for more than 31 years, working narcotics and violent crimes as he moved up the ranks. He already had plenty of career cases before this week, but he proved himself on the biggest of stages.
Same goes with so many of the detectives in Providence, unsung heroes who have a high volume of cases and have steadily improved their clearance rates in the recent years.
What we saw was competence. Professionalism. Relentless work.
It’s not just law enforcement that deserves credit.
Mayor Brett Smiley, who was painted as a leftist extremist more interested in draping himself in a rainbow flag than letting the police do their work, showed a steadiness that you rarely see from first-term mayors in a crisis.
In 2023, Smiley ordered his staff and public safety departments to run a full-scale mass shooter training just to be as prepared as possible for a day he hoped would never come. He offered clarity and compassion in the hours and days that followed.
The good police work and steady leadership still won’t bring back Ella Cook and MukhammadAziz Umurzokov, the two students who were just trying to study for their finals when they were senselessly gunned down last Saturday.
And yes, the Providence Police Department is not perfect. Accountability still matters. Any officer who abuses power deserves consequences, and solving a big case shouldn’t buy anyone a lifetime pass.
But what matters this week is that when Providence was tested, Providence delivered.
Dan McGowan can be reached at dan.mcgowan@globe.com. Follow him @danmcgowan.