The Fence - Dick Lehr [32]
For their part, Boston police were scrambling to combat the frightening rise in violent crime fueled by rampant drug use, especially crack cocaine. The 95 homicides in 1988 skyrocketed to 152 by 1990, with taped-off crime scenes becoming as frequent as sunup and sunset. Street gangs flourished, and some police commanders admitted openly that officers on the frontlines in Roxbury, Dorchester, and Mattapan were aggressively going after known gang members and anyone else associating with them. One captain in Roxbury was quoted in the Boston Herald in 1989 saying, “People are going to say we’re violating their constitutional rights, but we’re not too concerned about that…If we have to violate their rights—if that’s what it takes—then that’s what we’re going to do.”
The captain later called the remark a “psychological ploy” and insisted officers were not randomly harassing blacks or trampling on their rights. Police Commissioner Roache, soon after the captain’s public comments, even issued a May 23, 1989, memorandum describing the department’s “profound responsibility” to honor and protect citizens’ rights under the U.S. Constitution and Massachusetts law.
Certain Superior Court judges were not convinced. One judge threw out two criminal cases after ruling Boston police had violated constitutional protections against unwarranted searches and pat downs. The famous U.S. Supreme Court case controlling these circumstances was a 1968 case known as Terry v. Ohio. In it, the nation’s highest court ruled police cannot stop and frisk someone on a hunch, but must have a “reasonable suspicion” the person was engaged in or about to engage in criminal activity. In Boston, Superior Court Judge Cortland Mathers found that Boston police were violating so-called Terry principles by practicing a policy that “all known gang members and their associates (whether known to be gang members or not) would be searched on sight.” The policy, the judge ruled, was tantamount to “a proclamation of martial law in Roxbury” against street gangs and other young blacks.
Judge Mathers was also unimpressed by Commissioner Roache’s memo seeking to reassure the public that police were not running roughshod over people’s rights. In a scathing rejection, Mathers said, “The Court finds a tacit understanding exists in the Boston Police Department that constitutionally impermissible searches will not only be countenanced but applauded in the Roxbury area.” The police brass continued to disagree and defend the department in a war of words with their critics.
Newspaper headlines were one thing, the street was another. Smut Brown and others like him lived in a world where they believed Boston police would do anything to get them—lie, cheat, set you up. There was anecdotal evidence to draw on—instances where some officers didn’t care about the truth and the law, only the conviction.
In one 1989 court case, an officer testified he watched a drug deal go down. But the officer would have needed X-ray vision for his testimony to have been true—he was standing on the other side of a two-story building when the alleged drug deal occurred. In a gun case, another officer testified he saw a gun stashed on a second-floor landing—and, again, this was superhuman. The officer would have had to be 30 feet tall for the eyewitness testimony to be true.
The police perjury had a name: “testilying.” The fabrications might be rooted in good intentions—to convict the guilty. The officers wanted to arm prosecutors with the strongest, cleanest testimony