Thirteen of the 22 top leaders in Boston’s Police Department live outside the city in apparent violation of the city’s residency requirement, a law frequently ignored and weakly enforced, according to a Globe analysis of payroll and property records.
Among them: the Police Department’s second in command, Superintendent in Chief William G. Gross, who lives in Milton, according to payroll records.
But he’s hardly alone. Managers in the city’s technology division and the Inspectional Services Department, high-ranking school administrators, and the head of the school police, Eric J. Weston, also live beyond Boston’s border. So does Matthew A. Cahill, executive director of the Finance Commission, a city watchdog agency.
The Globe identified at least 50 municipal employees living in the suburbs in apparent violation of the residency requirement. But there may be hundreds more violating the spirit of the law, if not the letter: Many School Department employees — nurses, psychologists, guidance counselors, and others — have been allowed to ignore the residency requirement and live in the suburbs.
In the four decades since the residency rule was introduced — it arrived at a time when the city was hemorrhaging middle-class families — a simple idea has been overtaken by a contradictory patchwork of ordinances, state laws, and labor contracts. At times, tradition, as much as statute, has dictated application of the policy, allowing some employees to live in the suburbs because of the vagueness of the rules.