Chats I’ve had on the street this week about the city’s jettisoning of Police Chief Limon and bringing Dean Esserman into the post have been dispiriting.

The opinions I’ve encountered all strike me as superficial and cliché-ridden.

That can be understandable, since Limon didn’t have the job long and was under fire by dissembling naysayers for much of it. Esserman’s rep is shorthanded by his association with former chief Nick Pastore. But the sort of lightweight comparisons and improper references I’ve been hearing: “We’re back to giving free pizza to murderers” (a reference to a Pastore strategy for getting a confession one time) and various race- or class-based assumptions about Yale, downtown neighborhoods.

Police ain’t politics. There are things in common, and sometimes pols and cops do play the same games in how they get their messages out. There may indeed be questionable motives behind the leaving of Limon (who was doomed anyway because of the constant parroting of a spurious statistic—that New Haven is “the fourth most dangerous city in the United States”) and enlisting of Esserman, who I guess is supposed to represent a familiar and friendlier (though it wasn’t necessarily more peaceful) era of policing in the city.

But I blanch at attempts to stereotype, minimize or otherwise second-guess a job that is frightfully complex by any standard. The showiness of selecting and announcing a new guy, and gracefully getting rid of the old one, is a needless distraction. Let’s get back to this conversation when there’s something real to talk about—lower crime stats or more productive union relations or whatever.