The Fence - Dick Lehr [31]
The special commission pointed to the department’s inability to police its own as a singular failure of wide-ranging impact that put residents in danger, fueled mistrust residents felt about police, and tarnished the department’s reputation. “The failure to monitor and evaluate the performance of police officers—particularly those with established patterns of alleged misconduct—is a major deficiency,” it said.
The panel conducted a painstaking audit of the department’s Internal Affairs Division. The division’s work, the panel found, featured, “shoddy, half-hearted investigations, lengthy delays and inadequate record-keeping and documentation.” The panel discovered that less than 6 percent of all complaints of police misconduct filed by citizens were sustained as valid during the two-year period of 1989 and 1990. “This statistic strains the imagination,” the panel said. “It assumes that more than 9 out of 10 citizens who complain of police misconduct are mistaken or are lying.” The panel also found that a group of officers had gone largely unpunished even though they were repeat offenders and responsible for a “disturbing pattern of violence towards citizens.” In short, the department was brushing off police wrongdoing, not rooting it out. For the rank-and-file officers, the reality was that misconduct was no big deal—it rarely got them in trouble. Internal investigators either booted the investigation or did not look into the allegations at all.
In addition to calling for Commissioner Roache’s removal, the St. Clair Commission recommended an overhaul of the Internal Affairs Division to include developing an “early warning system” to identify those officers with multiple misconduct complaints so that they could be targeted for retraining and even counseling.
The St. Clair Commission’s findings were big news. It put Mayor Flynn back on his heels. In response, he said the department would implement many of the suggested reforms. For example, the department adopted a so-called Early Intervention System (EIS) to identify wayward officers. Initially, EIS required more than twenty complaints against an officer to trigger a review of the officer’s conduct. The high threshold seemed a joke, more a throwback to the past than a reflection of forward-looking reform, and soon enough the threshold was lowered to three complaints within a two-year period.
But Flynn stood by Roache, the commissioner he’d appointed. Flynn and Roache were boyhood friends who’d grown up together in Southie. “Mickey Roache may not have done very well in the area of management,” Flynn told reporters at a press conference. “But I give Mickey Roache an A-plus in the area of integrity and in the area of bringing people together racially.” Roache hung on to his job for another year. When Flynn was appointed to be American ambassador to the Vatican in 1993, Roach resigned to run for mayor, and Bill Bratton stepped into the commissioner’s seat.
Robert “Smut” Brown didn’t have to read the St. Clair report to know the black community in Boston’s inner-city neighborhoods deeply mistrusted the Boston police. Smut knew firsthand the kinds of abuses covered in the official report in clinical fashion. More than once, he said, cops had “done me wrong.” Following one high-profile killing, he was leaving the Rose Club and about to get into his car when two officers snapped him up. “They cuffed me and put me in the car and rode me around, asking questions.” He’d heard similar stories up and down the street. The alienation was embedded in the daily life of Roxbury, Dorchester, and Mattapan.
Black teens—some gangbangers, some not—had been complaining regularly to Boston and state officials about Boston police roughing them up. One girl, a seventeen-year-old tenth grader, said a police officer stopped her while she was walking down the street and asked her name. Why? she asked. The officer patted